Jessa Called Jay
by Elliott Silver
Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne. (This is a nine-part series. Rated R for the series, though not for every chapter) **Of course, the last words are Phryne's.**
1. The Edge Of An Apocalypse

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Author: Elliott Silver

Chapter 1: The Edge Of An Apocalypse

Timeline: Begins at the end of the finale of series 3, "Death Do Us Part."

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Rating: R, for the series as a whole, though not for every chapter.

Author's Note: To come at end of nine-part series.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Some things never change."

Phryne Fisher announces this briskly in Dottie Collins' small Collingwood kitchen.

 _Murder in Melbourne_ , the bold headline of the newspaper reads. _Police Hunt for Suspect in Docklands Attack_.

The black print of the Melbourne _Times_ stands out starkly here, against the white lace curtains and delicate pink roses on the tea cups, golden gingernut biscuits circled on scalloped plates. Light dances against a cut-glass bowl of daisies that throw idle shadows over the sunny table.

"And some things do," Dottie replies as an ear-shattering shriek erupts from the next room.

She sighs and pushes herself upright, smoothing the floral housedress over the bulk of her very pregnant belly.

Phryne watches her go, then tilts the page to skim the article by Jay Tayler, Melbourne's new Crime Correspondent. There hadn't been anything so special as a designated Crime Correspondent when she was last here; the most one could hope for was a somewhat accurate blurb in the back pages of the weekly paper, sandwiched somewhere after World Events and Society Doings, but before Gardening and Horoscopes.

When she left three years ago to fly her father home, she didn't know it would take so long to return. And yet as she puts down the paper, 1932 feels little different from 1928. Mac met her at the air field rather than the docks (though she rushed off for emergency surgery before they could have a proper drink), and 221B The Esplanade looks from the outside as it always did (though a small troop of servants has been hastily dispatched to promptly take care of the interior, given that it's been locked up since the abrupt departure of Mr. Butler some time before).

Dottie returns with a sniffling toddler in her arms and presents the squirming mass for Phryne's inspection. Phryne promptly declines to hold it.

"Say hello, Faith."

"Hello Faith," Phryne repeats automatically. With pale skin and red face, the child looks like an angry rutabaga.

"How old is she?"

"Just two now," Dottie answers, testing the contents of a bottle for warmth on her upturned wrist. She sits back down carefully, balancing for three as the child shrills in displeasure. "And her brother – I think – due next month."

Phryne nods and wishes there was more than just tea in her cup as her eardrums rattle with the keening. She smoothes back an errant wisp of her dark hair and straightens the edge of her skirt, trying to ignore the chaos. Dorothy Williams has made the transition from wife to mother easily, and through the tired lines of exhaustion it isn't hard to see she is content. And yet, it isn't the life Phryne had hoped for her young protégé who had shown such promise for making her way, as Phryne had, in a world that was so much larger than baby spit and soiled nappies.

"So how is Jane?" Dottie asks, drawing Phryne back into the present.

"Very well," she answers, setting her empty cup carefully back in its saucer. "She finished early at the Sorbonne and went to study medicine at Harvard."

There's little else to say since she hasn't seen her young charge since the Exposition of 1931 and wasn't there when she sailed for New York. The street-smart girl had transformed into a rather serious _jeune fille_ when she wasn't looking. Phryne had wanted her to continue her studies in Paris, but Jane hated the avant-garde _je ne sais quoi_ of city; she disliked everything the younger Phryne had found so appealing and maddeningly refused to be convinced otherwise.

Dottie nods her head, and Phryne chimes in between the baby's rather loud sucking on the bottle.

"And Mr. Butler?"

"He got married and moved to Perth last year," Dottie answers. "It was very quick, but there was a job offered for two and they decided to go together."

This explains the perilous state of her house. She's surprised that a man as fastidious as Tobias Butler would leave without proper notice. But then, she thinks, people do strange things for love.

"I would have hired them both."

"You weren't here."

Phryne feels the edges of sharpness in the other woman's voice, and there is a silence between them, redolent of something that Phryne has never felt to matter, the past.

The floor creaks as Dottie rocks the child in her arms, and Phryne has to look away, feeling dizzy with the motion.

"I'm sorry about your aunt," the younger woman continues at last. "We thought you would come back for the funeral."

The Fishers had received the telegram about Prudence's Stanley's death last May, though none had travelled for the funeral. Her father was irked that Aunt P. had been stubborn to the last and not included him in the will, and her mother was still recovering from a long illness. Phryne herself had been preoccupied by other things, and no one was inclined to sail halfway around the globe when Depression was spiraling wildly across the world. It's a sham excuse, Phryne knows as she tells Dot, but it's better than none.

"Will you stay for lunch then?"

Phryne hears the eagerness in the younger woman's voice, but refuses.

"No, no," she says, fighting not to appear so eager to leave. "I thought I would go by City South."

Adult company would be a balm after this, as would lunch preceded by a serious drink so she can think about continuing where she left off three years ago, the last time she was on Australian soil, when she was tantalizingly and possessively kissed by a certain Detective Inspector.

"If you're looking for Jack," Dottie says, reading her mind, "he's not there."

Phryne turns, fitting the toque hat high on her forehead. Her stomach twists, and not just in hunger.

"Then where is he?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

City Central station of the Victoria Police is far bigger and busier than City South ever was.

Everywhere there is some sort of chaos; telephones ringing, people shouting, the scuff of feet and tap of soles like drumbeats in this sharp-flat melody. The clack of typewriter hammers is nearly deafening.

Suspects are booked, drunks hauled to the tank before they vomit on the floors, captains and constables threading their way through the melee in their dark uniforms. Secretaries – primly dressed young women in pale colors – flit between them like songbirds winging along correspondence and files, pushing tea carts with sandwiches and pastries.

Phryne is lost from the moment she walks in, and it takes three people, two flights of stairs and quite a bit of artful dodging to find him again.

His office door is closed but his name is stenciled across the opaque glass like before, though now it reads, Deputy Chief Commissioner J. Robinson, his name only slighter smaller than his title.

Phryne stands there for a minute, thoroughly nonplussed.

The Jack she knew never wanted a desk job, would never have taken one if his life depended on it. There was too much out there in the world that called to them.

And yet here they are, both of them.

She wonders how it has come to this.

"I'm looking for Jack Robinson."

The earnest young woman at the center desk continues typing until the bell pings; she taps the carriage return lever and the machine advances to the next line. Only then does she look up.

She stares at Phryne openly, evaluating the ankle-strap heels to her capelet-sleeved dress (bought specially in Paris) that drops sumptuously to her shaped calves in an abundance of coral-colored jersey. It drapes on her just so, but the color burns here, vivid and unapologetic amidst so many beiges and browns, where people glance at her suspiciously but not enviously. It is as if they feel her burning and want to douse that blaze, deconstruct the hue; as if they could take apart fire by its elements, sifting fuel from spark, removing the furious heat.

"Do you have an appointment?"

"No," Phryne answers, mystified. "Should I?"

"He's busy at the moment."

Through the glass Phryne can see only shadows, the bob and blur of a head. She can hear the tone of a male voice, but not the words. It could be him; it could be anyone. Her heart sings off-tune.

"He'll want to see me," she persists, "I'm the _Honorable_ Miss Phryne Fisher."

She puts stress on her title. She rarely does.

"Perhaps," the girl answers, "but he's speaking with the _honorable_ Chief Commissioner."

She goes back to her typing.

"But – "

"There."

The girl gestures to the usual row of uncomfortable chairs lining the edges of the room.

Dismissed, Phryne sits and fumes.

This is nothing like the old days, with only Hugh and a few constables manning the desk at City South, where she could go through any locked door with only a smile.

Here there are guards at every corner, unassailable barriers that she cannot cross. Here there are rows of commendations and medals pinned to every wall, bright trophies in cabinets for police marksmanship and sportsmanship. Here everything is manicured into place, from the framed portrait of George V to the neat chain of desks with secretaries scratching dictation so quickly she can smell the lead of their pencils as they are ground against the paper. Here everything is so serious.

Phryne taps her fingers and prepares a suitably caustic volley as she watches the dusty hands of the clock on the wall inch towards ten after twelve.

Just as she's ready to launch herself across the room, the door swings open and a woman breezes past, the world suddenly blown open.

"Hello Ada – Marie – Louise – "

She greets the working girls as she sweeps in and they chorus cheerful replies that are such a contrast to their earlier stony silence.

This woman is tall and lithe and striking, her eyes as she turns to glance at Phryne the odd grey-green color of South Sea pearls. She has fair skin and honey-blonde hair, the color of melted butter, swirled into a short wave that barely reaches the nape of her neck. Her suit is a year or so behind the mode, but there's something timeless about the elegant way she wears it. The fabric color shifts in the light and the iridescent weave hums from blue to purple like a hummingbird on wing. Phryne thinks it's the color of gum leaves, slate-blue, the color that makes the mountains blend from earth to sky, that makes boundaries disappear.

The woman dips her head towards Phryne, a petite beret in the same color tilted on the crest of her head, matched by the muted grey of her gloves, bag and oxford heels. Tiny topaz earrings flash in the light as she looks forward and moves on.

She is stylish without being fashionable, even if she's not exactly beautiful, certainly not with that short bright hair and those sharp cheekbones, that agile body that is no less stunning for lacking proper round curves.

"Sybil," she says, addressing the secretary as she leans over and rests her gloved hands on the edge of the desk.

The girl immediately stops and looks up.

"Sybil, it's _Thursday_."

The younger woman stays perfectly still as the blonde walks forward, swinging open the door marked Deputy Chief Commissioner without waiting.

Standing now Phryne can hear the voice she once knew so well.

" – and then tomorrow – "

"Lunch," the woman orders.

" – we can – "

Then there's a distinct click of a phone being peremptorily hung up.

"I was talking – "

"Now."

There's a stretch of silence, pulled taut – Phryne imagines a staring contest, a battle of the wills, and waits for a dressing-down that never comes. Instead there's only muffled laughter, and two bodies reappearing at once.

The first time she sees Jack Robinson again her heart stops. His grey windowpane suit isn't as sleek as the bespoke suits she's used to seeing in London, but it's serviceable. Perhaps he isn't as wiry as he used to be, all trim muscle pulled tight over his bones, but he seems brighter now, healthier, more alive, as if he won't disappear when turned sideways. His white shirt collar is sharp and neat (what will the world come to when _that_ changes), his fedora hiding the bright chestnut hair she has so missed. The lines of his face seem deeper, though, more evident as his eyes crinkle when he laughs, a low, warm sound that still turns her belly sideways.

"Sybil," the woman says as they move by, their bodies so in sync she can't tell them apart. The phone is ringing and the girl's hand ready to answer. "Tell the Commissioner I'll have him back in an hour or so."

Jack offers his arm so the woman can thread hers through his steadfastness. Then all she hears is the tap of the woman's heels and Jack's leather soles as they descend the stairs.

It isn't often that Phryne Fisher is left speechless, but certainly she is now.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

She hasn't been a detective for some time, but it isn't hard to follow them.

They walk slowly. Jack buys sandwiches and a thermos of tea from a café, and they cross over Lansdowne Street into Fitzroy Gardens. They angle leisurely toward the main pathway, sweeping into the avenue of English elms to sit under the deep shade of a fig tree.

Phryne carefully selects a bench nearby, grateful for the dim shade. The coral jersey of her dress clings to her limply, and she fans herself vigorously with the folded newspaper she'd taken from Dottie's this morning. The ink of the headline bleeds against her damp fingers, leaving black words on her skin. She's used to rain and chill now, has let her blood grow thick with the English weather, and has forgotten how much warmer it is here than in England. Autumn in London is as cold and miserable as September in Melbourne is warm and bracing. She feels she is steaming here, even in the shade, and fancies she can see the famous blue haze of the eucalyptus vaporizing before her very eyes.

As she looks around, Phryne thinks that everything seems so much the same, from the flowers to the park fixtures. In some ways it feels as if she never left, or even that she's gone back in time. The bright red waratah are in full frenzy, flushed out by the profusion of white flannel blossoms and pink wax flowers, their sweet almond and lemon fragrance filling the air.

Nothing seems to have changed except the people.

And that's how she realizes just how long she's been gone.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The year she left – 1929 – had been one for the record books, from the unexpected (and unwanted) arrival of her father to her near-death at the cavalcade's mermaid act. It was the year of magic all her own, from her reminisces with Captain Compton to Italian dinners with Guido to searching for divine astronomy with Osman Efendi.

Yet what she remembers most about that time is the man she was with more than all of them together, Jack Robinson. There were times in that year before she'd left when she felt closer to the detective than ever before – when she wanted him more than she'd wanted any other man, when she would have done almost anything to have him. Those were the times that terrified her, the normality of it all, of wanting dinners, tennis games, waltzes and kisses from him, of sharing a life together, that sent her reeling into the arms of so many other men.

Jack loved her, she knows it, but she can't quite love him back – not the way that he wants. And yet she can't give up on him, on them, and desperate to get her father home, she tells him to come after her.

He had tried, she thinks, in his defense, but she didn't.

He wrote, he sent telegrams, he inquired about air tickets and steam travel. But she didn't answer.

At the time it was quite simple.

It was Fisher the Elder that kept Fisher the Younger contained, as Jack had once put it. Besides his usual shenanigans (German trade deals! In 1929?) and her mother's illness (a long bout of Spanish influenza) Phryne has more than enough to keep her busy.

And then, October.

It seemed she had just arrived in London when the first crash hit, the catastrophic plummet of the stock market in America. Black Tuesday became Black October and it never got better. Depression paralyzed the world. Industry collapsed, agriculture followed, banks closed, families dissolved. It isn't too much to say that the world went to pieces, and she went with it.

She stays to look after her family – or, at least, the family money and the Somerset estate which she wrangles back (in a card game that she didn't rig – much). She converts her money into gold and considerable stock in industry and armaments – she remembers the last war.

London erupts around her. The city is used to dancing on death, from plague and fire, so this is no different. Those without money fade away; those with it spend it like there is no tomorrow. Parties billow up at the least provocation, and when restaurants can't keep enough champagne in stock, they take to drinking sweet sherry. She's developed a most volatile distaste for it.

It is hedonism on a scale unimaginable, even to Phryne. It's a racket; they all know it, but it is like dancing on the edge of an apocalypse. It is glorious; it is terrible.

And, then on the brink of madness, she met –

(Well, she won't think about that now.)

The fact remains: she had so many chances to go back.

But the thing is, she doesn't.

She didn't.

Until now.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Phryne looks up only then.

The woman is gone and Jack is alone, capping the thermos and crumpling the wax sandwich wrappers.

He tucks the flask under his arm and walks out of the shade.

In the sun, he glows, as handsome as ever, and her heart wobbles.

He moves towards the pathway, binning the rubbish. Gravel snaps under his feet, and above the branches of the elms ripple in a breeze, vivid green against a perfect blue sky.

She stands, palms suddenly sweaty and breath caught in her chest, as he turns.

For the first time in three years, Jack Robinsons sees her.

He stops.

"Phryne?"

He doesn't remember to be more formal, and this, she thinks, is exactly why she's come home.

"Hello, Jack."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	2. Phryne Of A Thousand Days

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Author: Elliott Silver

Chapter 2: Phryne Of A Thousand Days

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Rating: R, for this chapter

Note: Thank you to all you wonderful readers.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Ready?"

Her voice is low and sure by his side, as it always has been. The murmur in his heart subsides as Jack Robinson breathes and takes her hand in his.

"I am now."

The woman smiles as they walk forward together.

He hates these things, but as Deputy Chief Commissioner he is required to attend the annual Policeman's Ball, that yearly gathering of the city's brightest and finest.

The room goes silent when they walk in, but it's a different kind of silence now, one of respect and even admiration. If he'd tried this two years ago, after the disaster that was his penance, everyone would have looked up and just as quickly looked away. Someone might even have thrown a fist his direction, perhaps more than one, perhaps more than a fist. Now he is greeted as he goes, commended even.

It's funny how things change.

Of course, he knows it's not all for him, not even out of respect, but also for the woman at his side.

Jessamine Tayler positively glows.

She is wearing a long silk dress the color of her name, white gloves to her elbows, her blonde hair rippled back in twin abalone combs so she looks like she's wearing a crown or a halo. Queen or angel, he can't decide.

She's radiant, it's electric, and he feels it.

He isn't alone.

So here they are, hailed, greeted, included. Jessa greets them all back, enveloped and embraced, asking all the right questions, quick with all the right answers. This was never his strong suit, so Jack kisses her gently on the cheek, careful not to smudge the light powder on her face, and inches toward the edge of the room where he can sit rather than stand. His knee aches; he winces and he's certain it's going to rain soon.

He seats himself gratefully and watches the room move around him, the bolts of the universe come undone. The Lord Mayor is here, and all the men from Parliament House, mixing with the starched and uniformed ranks of the Victoria police. Wives float on the arms of their husbands, bringing a hint of color to the sparse hues of their spouses. There's a flash of violet, a dash of emerald, a trace of cobalt.

But no one brings more color than Jessamine.

He looks at her, and marvels.

This blonde woman has a fluidity about her he can't describe. It's the way she moves, the way she holds herself. It's not grace exactly, not structured or superficial. He didn't know how to understand it until she told him about her childhood, about exile to her grandfather's cattle station, about the horses and learning to ride. That explained everything, the twist of her fingers as if on reins, the curve of her thigh as she moves, the unconscious way she's always looking forward.

Even from across the room he feels her, and knows she feels him.

She raises her head and out of the melee, she comes to him.

She always does.

Gently she settles to the seat next to him on the edge of the room, the fringe where people are talking rather than dancing. She doesn't say anything – doesn't have to – but takes his hand as another woman comes in.

His heart stops.

It's just like her, Jack thinks, to disappear for a thousand days and then show up when he least expects it.

Phryne Fisher wears a black dress lashed with iridescent sequins like feathers. Except the plumes – the glittering ones stitched into the heavy satin of her bodice and the ombré cascade of real ostrich feathers that form a skirt that drifts to her knees – are not the blue and green of a peacock, but the red of a phoenix, a miracle risen again from the ashes of the past. Around her neck is another feather, this one crafted of white gold, heavy with diamonds for the curving quill, the feather barbs set with rubies, the center eye in golden citrine.

Phryne Fisher literally glitters wherever she goes.

Jack has imagined her return in so many ways, but none like now, none when she looks like this, when he can't remember all the things he had to say to her. Her black hair is loose and longer, almost curling to her shoulders, her restless hands encased in black gloves, her eyes darkened, her mouth still vibrantly red.

He wants to say that he thought she would never come back, but in his heart Jack knew that someday Phryne Fisher would come waltzing back into his life, as sleek and sassy as always.

The year she left – 1929 – had been one for the record books. It had started with magic, with the cavalcade show, with him in Phryne's bed, and somehow it had only gone downhill from there. Every time he moved forward, she moved away; every time he moved away, she came back. He tried to be one of her liberal-minded men, but he simply wasn't on par with Captain "Courageous" Compton or Rinaldo the Rodeo Rider, all her other dashing heroes.

Phryne's eyes were always turned skyward, while his were always directed earthward, where he sees her bare feet, toenails red against the dirt. She dances to everyone's tune but his, but he plays along because he doesn't know what else to do. Love is a game to Phryne, just like tennis or cards. He can waltz with her, protect her from spiders, and make her a Special Constable, but he can't win.

In the end, he'd always known that another man would sweep her away from him (though he'd never imagined it would be her father). He'd kissed her, hard, and she'd swooned against him as if she meant it, as if she really did want him to come after her.

Then – not even a wobble of her wings – and she was gone.

He was alone.

He felt it keenly, working cases in stillness and silence unbroken by the roar of the Hispano-Suiza's engine or the swish of her skirt through doorways. He'd counted up his leave, knew the schedule to Southampton by heart, had tallied up his savings to cash in at the Peninsular & Oriental office.

Yet he never did.

As Phryne had said herself, there was a whole world out there, and the men in her life were the least of his worries.

Depression hit Melbourne hard, and he was no exception. It's not the crash that hurts, but the hard landing at the end. Crime skyrockets and murder abounds in those black days, but he – he just misses her.

And then –

Well, no sense thinking about that now.

The hard road of the past is the only way you get the present.

Across the room, Phryne notices him and walks forward.

He counts down the paces until she is there, until she stands above him, just out of his reach, as perhaps she always has been.

"Hello Jack."

"Miss Fisher."

He nods his head so curtly he's afraid it might snap his neck. He called her Phryne in the park yesterday afternoon, and he watches her test his formality.

She stands at attention, waiting for him, and reluctantly he pushes himself to his feet. She's always made him feel like he's lacking, behind when it comes to doing his job or following leads, or simply at beginning.

"May I introduce – "

Beside him Jessa stands and reaches out her hand.

" – the Honorable Miss Phryne Fisher," she finishes.

The dark-haired woman seems startled at the brazen uncovering of her identity, though she hides it well. She takes and shakes Jessa's hand, black kid glove against white silk.

"Jessamine Tayler," the blonde says. "But call me Jay."

Something shakes loose in Phryne's head.

"Jay Tayler?" she questions, "The crime reporter from the Melbourne _Times_?"

"Yes," Jessa smiles.

"Such an odd profession for a woman."

"No more than a lady detective."

"Touché."

Across the space they share a look, sizing each other up in a way that makes him immediately uncomfortable. Battle lines are being drawn, and he isn't sure where he stands among them.

"But you're engaged," Phryne notices, seeing the silver ring and diamond chip on Jessa's finger over the silk of her glove. "Who's the lucky man?"

For a moment time stands still. Then Jack takes Jessa's hand without breaking Phryne's gaze.

"I am."

He watches Phryne's face stay exactly the same, and that's how he knows how hard the blow hits her. Not at skin or bone, but deeper, through muscle, through sinew, to heart.

Before he can say anything further, a booming voice interrupts them like thunder.

"Jack!"

Chief Commissioner Callum O'Callaghan engulfs Jack's hand in his own, his calluses still rough enough to sand skin off his palm. "So good to see you here."

He's huge and he's Irish, temperamental and abrasive to a fault, but he's also fair, which is why Jack likes working for him. He prizes loyalty and honesty and the truth, even when it hurts.

Callum's spiky green eyes miss nothing as they sweep over the assembled group.

"You know Miss Tayler, and this is Miss Fisher," Jack introduces, pulling together the threads of his manners.

Callum narrows his eyes.

"Not that same Miss Fisher that caused such problems with Commissioner Sanderson so many years ago?"

His brogue catches on their past history and snags.

Phryne smiles dazzlingly as she holds out her hand.

"One and the same."

"So it is."

His face doesn't change, but it wouldn't. Callum does not take her hand; instead, he turns to Jack.

"If you don't mind, I'll ask this beautiful woman to dance."

Jack sees Phryne ready to accept, but it's Jessa that Callum means, taking her hand as if she is some small fragile thing that needs to be sheltered and cosseted from so much as an unkind word.

Jessa takes his hand as if nothing could break her, not steel rods or iron chains, or even Phryne's terrible dark look.

Jack watches them walk away, and if Phryne thinks it odd how easily he lets Jessa go, she says nothing. After all, she's made him learn how to do just that, and he's had years to perfect doing it.

Without waiting Phryne moves into the seat that Jessa left, pushing it closer to him so that their thighs are touching, so that he feels her warmth even through the fabric and feathers between them.

Beside him she is as opulent and lush as the rare bird whose phoenix-feathers are embroidered on her gown. Beside him, she is as warm and alive as if she had never left.

He wonders where she will begin.

"Odd name, isn't it?" she asks. "Jessamine."

"It's a flower."

"I didn't take you for someone who liked floral women."

"No, you took me for someone who liked women mis-named for courtesans."

Has she spent her whole life fighting between Psyche and Phryne, goddess and courtesan? Sometimes Jack wonders if she was destined to live up to her name from the beginning, if she was cursed that way.

Beside him Phryne goes for the path of least resistance. She rests her hand on his arm.

"Jack, are you upset?"

He understands Phryne, understands her with a clarity so sharp it makes him bleed. Now he can pinpoint her every move, knows where she will go before she does, knows what she will say before she opens her mouth. It is infuriating; it's debilitating.

"Upset?" he queries. "Am I upset?"

"Well, are you?"

"You left for three years – "

"Only – "

"Three years!" he explodes and people sitting nearby stare.

Phryne's face freezes.

"I told you to come after me."

"And I tried," he responds. "I tried."

"Jack, I'm sorry – "

"Don't apologize, it only confuses me."

He realizes too late that's a line from their past, so he continues.

"Besides, you don't mean it."

Phryne turns away. She doesn't deny it, but he feels like a beast all the same. That's the thing with Phryne, he always feels like he should apologize without quite knowing why. He has come to think she's always right, even when she's not. She turns the world upside down for him.

In silence they watch the melee of dancers. In the midst of the greens and blues there is a single flash of gold that stands out. Even the ruby sparkles of Phryne's dress and necklace can't compare.

Across the room, Jessa looks over at him, and he feels the world turn right-side up again.

If Phryne is Artemis, goddess of the hunt and the wild, then Jessa is Athena, the grey-eyed goddess of wisdom. He remembers too well the fate of Actaeon. Enraged when at last seen naked, vengeful and volatile Artemis transformed the hunter into a stag to be torn apart and killed by his own hounds, the hunter become the hunted, a sacrifice based on a woman's whim.

"We used to dance too," Phryne says, breaking the silence as she has his past.

"Yes, we did," he answers, thinking of the twilight waltz they shared and all the times they did so without musical accompaniment.

"We could again."

The feathers of her dress catch on his knee; they stick. He can feel it through to his bones as if she might force him into flight with her.

"No," he answers. "Not anymore."

He taps his knee.

"Hurt it?" she wonders.

He gives her a look, one that is both pitying and agonized all at once.

"You could say that."

She waits a moment.

"What happened?"

"You left," he answers.

Her face is unreadable, and he wonders if that is her pride. Does she imagine that people cannot live without her? If she does, he knows she is mistaken. He is proof of that, not that he ever wanted to be.

But now her thigh is pressed against his, knee to knee, and it's only such a little distance to put his hand over hers, or turn her shoulder so she's facing him, so that they are only a breath apart, a heartbeat – that way he always remembers them, that way they could be again.

Phryne moves, but Jessa is already there, yellow as the morning sun burning away darkness. She reaches out and Jack takes her hand so she pulls him upright, slowly, gently, as if she's done it a million times before because she has.

He moves to leave, but Phryne takes his arm and stops him. For a moment he is hung there, stretched between two women.

"But I'm here now," she says.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"What are you thinking?"

He's been waiting for her questions all night.

They have left and come here, come home to his bungalow in Elwood. It's late but they, he and Jessa, haven't bothered with the lights so she stands before the mirror in darkness, etched in shadow against its cool reflection as she unpins her earrings and drops them to a dish on the bureau where they dazzle against the dull glow of his cufflinks and shirt studs and tie bars.

All he can see of her is the line of her back and a sliver of her cheekbones, the part of her hair reflected back in the silver surface. In the darkness she is only a blur of pale skin, a flash of eyes, the catch of her breath.

The truth is that right now he doesn't know what to think of Phryne Fisher but he does know what to think about Jessa Tayler.

He knows that there is nothing she could do not to be a light in all his dark places.

He reaches for her, bridging the distance between them, his fingers settling on her skin, his palms over the ball of her shoulders. He slides his hands from arm to elbow to wrist until their hands meet.

"I was thinking of you."

It's a lie – if only a small one – and she knows it, but she says nothing.

Jack steps closer, so that his chest comes against her back, so that they are skin to skin, his warm, hers cool. He can smell the trace of perfume on her neck as she leans back into him and he kisses the edge of her forehead.

Jessa exhales as he lets go of her hands, his fingers sliding over thin silk to undo the closures of her dress. The yellow-gold fabric slips off her shoulders and cascades to the floor.

She stands like Athena, bare in bone and spine, missing only her Corinthian helmet and shield. She is not unblemished, though she is more beautiful for it. Her body shows the marks of war, of another time and place, or perhaps of all the lifetimes of the world.

Jack too knows how life leaves marks on our skin, and how sometimes how the worst wounds are the ones that don't show. It is knowledge that comes at such a great price, and they have, both of them, paid dearly.

His fingers trace these lines on her skin, the ghostly brands where her body has been blemished by violence. He skims the scar down her hairline, barely visible through her short hair, to the welts down her back, jagged and white as lightning on the horizon, these marks of the world that have brought them together.

She turns in his hold, and her mouth meets his without waiting. She tastes sweet, like champagne, like stars in a glass, against the salt and savor of his whisky. He tangles his hands in the ends of her hair, kissing the line of her cheekbone, the shell of her ear, the tip of her chin until she pulls him back to her, her tongue sliding along his lower lip so that the weakness in his knees has nothing to do with pain.

To be honest, he once imagined this with Phryne, their two bodies coming together, and it drove him nearly to madness (because imagination can do that). In his mind it was always the same, the merciless way of it, how she would eat him alive and he would endure it. She'd had so many men, and in all his life he'd only been with four women – Rosie, the one he'd married; Kadira, in Gallipoli who made him forget the war; Evilyn, when he was seventeen and sure he'd found the woman he would be with forever; and then the dark-haired woman whose name he doesn't know when he drank too much and willingly paid for an hour of solace.

He doesn't have to imagine with Jessa.

"What are you thinking?" she asks again.

"I was thinking of you," he answers once more, truthfully, as he slips his hands low so that he finds the swirl of her hipbones, the swell and curve of them. He cherishes the way her body fits into his palm before he slides between them, until she gasps and he feels the edges of her teeth on his skin.

"When I can tease you and you'll give me that look."

"What look?" she asks, arching against him, indignant for his touch.

"That look!"

They both laugh, they can't help it, and the sound rumbles against their skins as it always does. It tickles but he isn't laughing as she pulls him with her as their bodies tangle and collapse to the bed.

She is impatient tonight, they both are. Her hips roll into him and without waiting he pushes deep, bringing himself home. Her eyes are steady with his as he moves, she follows, and they rock together.

It isn't long before he feels the tension building low in her beautiful body, the tensile coil of her muscles and tendons sprung tight against him, the dew of sweat on her skin so he tastes salt on his tongue.

She shivers against him, close.

"I was thinking of this moment," Jack whispers, kissing her between breaths, "when you're so close and all I have to do is move – " he does, one long deep slide, " – and say, come with me – " he does, breathing into her ear, " – and you will."

She does, body breaking up into his, so that the cage of her ribs comes against his as if trying to merge their two hearts. Without waiting, she pulls him with her so that he feels the beat of her heart as his body strains, as now his hold on the world now loosens under her hands.

"I was thinking of this moment," she whispers to him, as her tongue traces the rim of his ear, her teeth on his lobe. He gasps and is quite certain he sees stars behind his closed eyes. "When I say your name and that's all it takes."

She moves beneath him, shifting so that he slides to his hilt.

" _Jack_."

And that is all it takes, his name in her voice.

It takes a moment (or so) for the world to come back to him, but when it does she is there and he twines against her. Beside him she is warm and soft and real. He holds her hand in his and twists the ring around her finger.

"What are you thinking?" he asks into their sleepy darkness.

"I was thinking that I love you," she answers simply, because it is.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The knocking is vociferous, or at least it seems that way in the small hours of the morning when all else is quiet in the leafy arbors of Elwood.

Jessa is warm and languid next to him and Jack curses freely under his breath as the knocking begins anew. He swings out of bed, yanking on pajama bottoms and quite willing to happily shoot whichever constable is standing on his doorstep on sight.

"Yes, yes yes," he whispers down the darkened hallway, managing not to trip over the carpet or his shoes as he crosses the room, though he does catch the edge of the table with his shin and unlocks the door with a mouthful of expletives that would make sailors blush.

Phryne Fisher stands before him, hand raised to knock again. She drops it to her side.

He stands staring at her, unbelieving.

"Jack – " she begins but there a noise behind him and she freezes.

"Jack?" Jessa comes from bedroom, wearing only the top of his pajamas, thighs pale and feet bare. She holds his service revolver in her hands and he hears the click of the cylinder as she snaps it into place. "Who is it?"

Bloody hell.

He throws the door open wide and the two women stare at each other.

He's not sure who's the more surprised.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	3. The Sparkle of Sea Glass

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 3: The Sparkle of Sea Glass

Author: Elliott Silver

Note: Again, many thanks to all my readers, for inspiration and comments.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

Phryne Fisher wakes up with the sun in her eyes.

She immediately pulls the duvet over her head and groans. Her head spins and stomach whirls.

She feels vile and thinks, _I am too old for this_.

Too old for so much green chartreuse and champagne.

The night before is a blur, but she does remember breaking one of her cardinal rules: never drink anything that's a different color than your dress.

She curls under the covers and revels in the silence. Normally the milkman would wake her at six, or the newspaper at seven, but today there are no such disruptions. There are no unruly lovers, ringing telephones, or clattering workmen to disturb her. There's no Mr. Butler to shush them all and fail gallantly. In fact, there isn't even road traffic to break her perfect wall of silence.

She knows why that is. Her side of the street is silent, two houses vacant, left empty by the Depression even in the posh suburb of St. Kilda. She was informed that the Edwards family at the end of the street had pulled a "midnight flit," disappearing into the night to avoid their unpaid rents. Where there were night clubs and gin bars, now there are breadlines and soup kitchens, swagmen and shanties, "bandicooting" and "snowdropping." No one dances now, not the waltz, the Charleston, or the tango; but every day men walk the "hungry mile."

This certainly isn't what she expected when she returned to Melbourne.

Then what had she expected?

 _Not this_ , is the only answer she has. Not Melbourne, in tears and tatters. Not Jack Robinson, engaged.

No, certainly not that, she thinks, and feels sick with it.

The world she has imagined, the one she left, has gone sideways under her feet and she hasn't yet regained her balance.

She was hoping Jack would help her with that, putting things right that effortless way he always could, leading as he did when they waltzed together. She was hoping to breathe his scent as he spun her away and then pulled her to him. She was hoping for the touch of his lips, the warmth of his mouth on bare skin, the nip of teeth as they joined, the rush of their hearts as they settled together.

She was hoping for more than waking up alone.

Footsteps tap up the stairs, pounding in unison with her headache, and her bedroom doors squeals open.

"Go away," she says from beneath the bedsheets.

"Yes, and it's nice to see you too, Phryne."

The no-nonsense voice of Elizabeth MacMillan echoes in the room as the doctor throws the covers from the bed and surveys its limp inhabitant with her hands on her hips.

Phryne remains prostrate on the bed.

"What was it this time?"

"Chartreuse and champagne," she groans.

"That'll do it."

She hears Mac floundering in her cases, searching for what she hopes is a robe. She fell into bed wearing only her tap pants, which upsets Mac none but is a bit chilly for conversation. Her dress from the night before hangs inside out on the back of her dressing-chair, a trail of red feathers like bloody footsteps leading from door to bed to chair.

"Coffee?" Mac queries as she delves through a startling array of French lingerie.

Phryne's stomach does a slow roll and she shakes her head.

"Tea then."

Mac finally excavates something with a grunt of approval and throws it to her. Black silk cascades over her arms as the doctor turns and thumps down the steps. The robe is an old favorite, the one with the fighting cocks on it, but it's begun to show its age, a small cigarette burn in the right cuff, the elaborate embroidery unraveling so that the wings of the one bird have come undone, preventing him from flight.

The robe is not unlike herself, she supposes.

She slips the silk over her pale body, ignoring the way her skin has become less taut and more soft in the last years. She's altogether a softer woman than when she left in 1929, one that is plush and sensuous, one that lacks such hard edges.

Below Phryne hears the screech and clatter of the kettle and tea set. She wants to stay in bed, but she knows Mac well enough to know that the doctor will physically throw her from it if she stays here. Mac's done it before. She's a great believer in the idea that exercise cures all.

Phryne pads downstairs in her bare feet to find Mac lounging in the parlor, drinking tea and reading the Melbourne _Times_. The doctor looks up when she appears and bends forward to pour her a cup, mixing in four sugar cubes and a heavy dollop of cream. She hands it to her with two packets of aspirin.

Phryne takes the cup gratefully, swallows the aspirin, and tucks herself into the mahogany armchair.

"What are you doing here?" she asks, though perhaps it would be more fitting if it was Mac asking her.

Mac folds the paper and sets it on the tea tray. The doctor considers her carefully, almost surgically.

"Jay asked me to check on you."

"Jay Tayler?"

"Yes, why?"

"Why would she care?"

"I imagine because she's the one that drove you home last night, or do you not remember that?"

"She drove me home?"

Phryne sobers up remarkably quickly, and it has nothing to do with the tea.

"So you don't remember."

Mac pins her with a fierce gaze.

The truth is, Phryne does remember, though she very much doesn't want to.

She remembers the way that Jack Robinson walked away from her without so much as backward glance. She remembers reaching for champagne from one of the servers, and then reaching for two more before she was brash enough to ask a bright young constable to dance, and having one more before his partner swung her a bit too enthusiastically into the Charleston. She remembers the feathers on her dress flying; she remembers the room whirling.

Bu she also remembers the darkness behind her as he answered the door, the way Jack stood not in shadow but in light. She remembers how grey his hair is now, not the crop on his head but the whorls on his bare chest when he opened the door. She remembers how she wanted to touch him, to kiss the sleep off his mouth, to take him back to bed.

She remembers the way his ring glitters on another woman's finger, and perhaps, more unusually, his gun in her hands.

"I went to see him," Phryne defends. "I didn't know she would be there."

"She usually is."

"But they're not married."

Mac rests back and her gaze becomes harder. Phryne can almost feel the doctor probing inside her head, and if she is, Phryne wishes she would root around and stop the alcohol from drumming about in there.

"When did you become such a prude?"

Phryne tosses her head, but the movement only makes her skull hurt.

Mac leans forward and rests her elbows on her knees.

"What did you think, Phryne? That you would show up and seduce yourself back into his arms?"

The doctor exhales.

"Into his bed?"

"I've never been in his bed," Phryne refutes honestly, though it pains her to do so. (Truly, he's been in hers, but she wasn't in it at the time.)

"More's the pity," the red-head replies evenly.

"Mac!" she blurts out. "Did you – ?"

The doctor waves her away, but Phryne knows she had always harbored feelings for the detective, despite being a devoted discipline of Sappho. She's always cared for him, sometimes Phryne wonders if not a little too much.

"Then what happened?" she asks.

"You left," Mac answers her simply.

It seems everyone is telling her that, she thinks tiredly.

Phryne can't argue with her. She understands all too well the male need for female company. What she doesn't understand is why it has to be more than that. Why does it have to be about more than pleasure? Why does anything in life have to be?

After all she and Jack have shared, she can't understand what the blonde possesses that she does not.

In the background the front door rattles and the newly-hired maid scuffles towards it.

"What does he see in her?"

Mac opens her mouth and then closes it.

"What did he see in you?"

Phryne twists around to see Jay Tayler haloed in the doorway to her parlor, not having heard the door open or the maid escort her in.

(She makes a mental note to fire the maid.)

The reporter glows in the sun. Her bright hair sparkles as much as her unusual eyes. Today they are the bright color of sea glass, something sharp and broken polished smooth over time. She wears a smart navy suit of Crêpe de Chine, edged with a lavender satin collar and sash that nips in at her waist. A navy cloche sits rakishly on her head. Tiny amethyst drops swing on the lobes of her ears.

The diamond ring sparkles on the third finger of her left hand.

Phryne pushes her head back against the velvet of the chair's upholstery and considers the woman in front her. There's something vibrant about her, a relentless energy that dazzles, that electrifies, something that pulls at you.

Jay lets her look, though Phryne only feels dull in comparison.

"How are you feeling?"

"Fine," Phryne lies through her teeth. Her stomach twists with the effort of it. She knows she should feel embarrassed at being caught out so blatantly, but in the bright morning sun she can't bring herself to feel anything other than an ache that spans from her head to her heart.

Phryne can't bring herself to feel contrite. She didn't come here for that, she didn't come back for this.

"I hear I owe you thanks," she says grudgingly. "For driving me here. Jack could have done that."

She watches the reporter take in the way she uses his name, the intimate way she breathes it in and out, but her eyes do not waver.

Phryne remembers only too late what glass really is – fire and sand burned so hot that it fuses and becomes crystalline, until it sparkles, until it cuts.

Jay looks to Mac, who looks away, and then back to Phryne.

Something shifts slightly. Phryne sees it in the way the woman's spine straightens, the way her eyes narrow. Phryne realizes all too late that Jay Tayler is less a pretty porcelain doll than an Amazonian warrior.

"You don't know what happened, do you?" she asks.

The room seems to hold still for just a second (perhaps a lifetime), before she continues.

"Jack rarely drives," Jay replies. "And he hardly ever dances."

Phryne realizes she is holding her breath, though she doesn't know why.

"Patellar fracture – " Mac begins and is swiftly interrupted by Jay.

"He almost died."

Phryne feels the sharpness of the words as she was meant to. Her lungs burn, and even her heart holds still. It stops beating, then soldiers on, traitorously. It's terrible for her to imagine a world without Jack Robinson in it. In truth, she doesn't want to. She can't.

"I didn't know."

"Why would you?" Jay asks. "You left."

She says it a way that no one has before, reminding Phryne that it was not so much the passive absence as the physical leaving that mattered. There is no malice in her voice, but Phryne feels something even more brutal, honesty.

Phryne rises, crossing her arms around her chest as if it will hide what's breaking beneath.

"You don't want me here."

"I don't want you to break his heart," Jay answers. "Again."

The diamond ring glitters in the light as the reporter turns and leaves.

The door shuts and echoes reverberate in the empty space. The sound ricochets in her head.

Phryne sits back down. She thinks she'd better.

Opposite, Mac pulls a silver flask from her coat pocket and takes a larger swing than just after noon calls for. Then she takes another. She doesn't offer it to Phryne, though she thinks she could use it.

After a silence the doctor speaks.

"You've always cared about your own happiness," Mac tells her. "And it's served you well."

She caps the flask and tucks it into her pocket as she rises.

"But you can't expect life to stand still while you're gone."

"I know."

"No, you don't," Mac replies. "You don't know what he went through, and you don't know what she did."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	4. Rainbow In A Snowstorm

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 4: Rainbow In A Snowstorm

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Note: I will be away from internet access for the next weeks, but will try to post the next chapter as usual, in about two weeks' time. In the meantime, I seem not to be receiving notifications/reviews from FF so readers are welcome to contact me directly if they wish, via PM.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1930, two years earlier / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Go away."

Jack Robinson's first words to her are not at all auspicious.

But she's been told worse, and Jay Tayler has never been one to turn away from a challenge.

The Melbourne hospital room swims around her, dull and dismal as a fishbowl. Outside spring rain blows hard against the windows, splashing misshapen reflections against the glass like ghosts and dead dreams. There are no flowers, no cards, just the bitter scent of antiseptic and bleached cotton.

The man in the bed hardly looks like a man at all. In fact, she can hardly hide her surprise that he is even alive. He certainly doesn't look it, and if he hadn't just spoken, if she hadn't just seen his chest rise with the effort, she wouldn't have believed it.

His thin body is jack-knifed under the sheets, the threadbare hospital shift barely hiding the layers of bandages over his chest. His right leg is pulled upright with a sling, holding the broken bones in traction against their will, trying to heal the misshapen lump that must be his knee. His head is swathed with bandages, almost like a halo, and one eye is still swollen shut, the other sunk into a vivid purple bruise that fades to his jaw, old blood pooling under his skin like nightshade. His hands are wrapped too, hiding knuckles that are split and oozing through the cotton wadding and perhaps the useless splints of broken fingers. They will not heal happily she knows from experience, a part of the body that bends and prevents itself from mending.

"My name is Jay Tayler," she states plainly, coming to the side of his bed. "I'm from the Sydney _Herald_ newspaper."

"I don't care," he says without looking at her. "Go away."

"I'm here to talk to you about your arrest," she continues. "About what happened."

"There's nothing to say."

The man on the bed turns away as much as possible, which is to say not far, rolling towards the dreary window.

His refusal is not unusual. As a crime reporter she is used to such recalcitrance, bound into the anxiety of deep suspicion or the battered wounds of trauma. Her job is simply to make people talk, to make them find the words they didn't know they had, usually by cracking open those wounds and lavishing them with salt.

The truth is rarely pleasant, and lies rest easier on weary hearts.

In point of fact, she probably wants to be here even less than this injured man does. She too hates hospitals but today she hates Melbourne even more. Its dusty skies opened like demented sluicegates as soon as she alighted from the train station, soaking her linen suit so that the fabric has stretched out of form and drenching her hair so that her chignon keeps dripping cold water down her back. More damagingly water has permeated her travel bag so that her paper disintegrated into swirls of cellulose and blue ink, tattooing her fingertips with melting words.

No, it is safe to say that the _Herald's_ News Correspondent does not want to be here.

It had taken a few weeks, but the story about a respected detective of the Victoria Police being charged with murder had made its way across the continent. In Sydney, the brief note is passed over by most, except by her editor.

"Cops go bad all the time," Jay argues. "What's different about this one?"

After all, things these days turn rotten quickly: fruit left in the sun, meat left in the heat, cops changing sides in the Depression. It's not unusual, and certainly not worth the sixteen-hour overnight train from Sydney.

"Something," Peter Jessup says mysteriously, betting on one of his infamous (and invariably misplaced) hunches.

Here, now in the grayness of the hospital room and this man's breath, she curses that hunch.

Jay raps sharply on the railing of the bed with her knuckles.

"Tell me what happened."

The man shrugs, as much as one can in such traction, and winces as he regrets it.

If he is guilty of these things, such pain is small recompense for his actions. As befitting the punishment for 1930, if he is found guilty, his former occupation will not save him: he will be put to death like any common criminal by hanging. He will be lashed to the gallows in front of the Old Melbourne Gaol and swung until his neck breaks or he strangles. If the latter, he will have some twenty minutes of hell to contemplate his crimes before his body is sucked empty of air and, at last, in agony he perishes.

"I want to know why you did it," Jay insists. "Why you killed a young girl?"

"Look," he rages suddenly, turning to her with such ferocity in his one open eye that she is taken back, "I did it!"

He breathes like it hurts, and she thinks, it probably does.

"I'm guilty."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

She sits at the Melbourne train station and fumes.

The Sydney train is late.

(Of course it is.)

She flips through the Melbourne papers, but they aren't very good and she is quickly bored of the never-ending rote of petty crime and hard times. The Depression has seen a sordid bloom in news reporting, as lost jobs and hungry mouths drive even the most honest people to break the law. Prices skyrocket, savings evaporate, catastrophe seethes like sweat on dynamite.

She herself isn't above the effects of the crisis.

Despite her initial petulance, she can't afford to thumb her nose at a decent job. She worked hard to get where she is, knows there are scores of unemployed writers just waiting to take her place, and realizes very clearly that she can't afford to return without a decent story.

Jay thinks about the damaged man on the bed, Jack Robinson. She thinks about what she has been told, what others have so easily accepted, but the timeline of events, as she understands them, does not make sense.

She pulls out her damp paper, uncaps her pen, and begins to write.

On the night of August 17, 1930, former Victoria Police Detective Jack Robinson went to a South Wharf warehouse. Later identified as a member of an illegal opium ring, he had ostensibly gone to take revenge on a fifteen-year old drug snitch (her name not given) who had turned evidence to the police. Around eleven o'clock, two constables patrolling the area heard a gunshot and arrived at the location to find the girl dead and the detective with gun in hand. Their discovery was paralleled by the arrival of the Chief Commissioner and a police team tipped off to the operation, who then took Detective Inspector Robinson into custody on the charges of murder and trafficking.

Jay looks at her notes and frowns.

Instead of clarity, she is left with questions.

None of this explains why the man was beaten within an inch of his life. From what she understands, he was found on the scene with such injuries. If the police didn't beat him, then who did? And why beat him with such specific methods – breaking fingers and battering his knee – over and over, a method that speaks more to interrogation than revenge?

It doesn't make sense, and Jay hates that.

Perhaps Peter's hunch was right. There is a first time for everything, after all. There may be something here, something to this story, and, if so, she will find it.

When the train to Sydney arrives, she is gone.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Jay Tayler is patient when she has to be.

She spends long days in the Melbourne Public Library searching through back issues of newspapers and public records. Under the skylights of the beautiful dome, she learns the detective's story.

John "Jack" Robinson was born in 1895 and grew up in working-class Richmond before joining the Victoria Police. He became a Senior Constable before the war called, a rather early decision that seems to have been determined by his prominent father-in-law. In 1915 he joined the army, became a Lance Corporal, and served with distinction in the Dardanelles. He returned from the war, where sides were fuzzy, to face the police strike in 1923, where sides were much more clearly defined. He chose his, and rose quickly to the rank of Detective Inspector.

By 1928, he seemed to have achieved something of a charmed life, his name appearing regularly in the local papers for a slew of notable achievements such as recovering pirate gold in Queenscliff, ending the trafficking in young girls from the Magdalene laundry, and settling scores of the Camorra crime syndicate.

After 1929, though, his name appeared less and less in the columns before it was gone completely, only to reappear again in the morning editions of August 18, 1930.

Jack Robinson was a good cop, she thinks, one of those individuals rare as a rainbow in a snowstorm.

But then something had happened, and she can't fathom what.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

She returns to the hospital to find out, but a fierce red-haired doctor blocks her way.

"Oh no," she says, white coat sweeping out like an avenging angel's wings as she stands between Jay and the room's door. "I don't know how you got in the first time, but you're not getting in again."

"Why not?"

"Orders of the Chief Commissioner," she answers, hands on hips, clipboard at the ready like a gunslinger.

They face off, but Jay speaks first.

"Do you think he's guilty?" she asks, motioning to the unseen man in the room.  
It clearly isn't the question the doctor expected.

"That's what they say," she replies as if it has been rehearsed, though it doesn't look like she believes a word of it.

Jay switches track.

"How bad are his injuries?"

The doctor snorts, a highly unladylike sound.

"You've seen him."

She has. She's seen his fingers, his black eyes, what used to be his knee.

"Injuries like those take time," Jay says. "You can't beat a man like that in five minutes."

"No," answers the doctor slowly,

"And they're painful – "

Jay finds she's thinking out loud, putting together the pieces that don't fit into place.

"Obvi – "

"So if the injuries occurred before, not after, the shooting – as it's said they did – and they were painful, as we know they must be – and he was hit in the head, perhaps multiple times, certainly causing dizziness if not disorientation – "

Jay takes a breath before leveling her last question at the doctor. "How was he able to shoot someone?"

The doctor stares as if measuring her. Jay reads the tag with her name: Elizabeth MacMillan. It's a good name, a solid name, befitting of someone with a steady hand and sharp scalpel.

"It would have been hard to see straight anyway," the doctor finally relents, "as pissed as he was."

"What?"

"That night Jack Robinson was dead drunk."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Jay knocks smartly on the door of the small Collingwood cottage.

The early spring weather is now cool and clear, so the windows are open, breeze fluttering the lace curtains within. A spate of daffodils blooms happily in the tidy garden.

Footsteps echo inside and the door sweeps open.

The man facing her is handsome in an honest way, with dusk-colored eyes and hair like candied ginger-root. His broad shoulders practically take up the entire entrance-way.

"Constable Hugh Collins?" she asks, and he nods. "My name is Jay Tayler, from the Sydney _Herald_."

The door closes again just as quickly, the brass knocker missing her nose by a hair.

Jay sighs.

Well, she is used to this too.

She raps again with her knuckles.

"I'd like to talk to you about Jack Robinson," she continues, speaking to the wood frame.

"Go away," comes a muffled voice from within.

She can hear movement inside.

"Hugh – "

"No, Dottie – "

Jay takes the moment to interrupt whatever's happening on the other side. "I want to help."

There's a breath of silence.

"But if – "

"Dottie, I said – "

"Maybe she can – "

"Look, reporters lie all the time – "

Jay frowns. "I can still hear you – " she says, though she's ignored.

"But he – "

"We can't – "

"Elizabeth Macmillan told me to come – "

There's a muffled thump from the other side, and then the door opens again and she stares straight into the very determined face of a very pregnant young woman, hazel eyes blazing against the porcelain pink of her skin and the curling waves of her caramel hair.

Behind her, the young constable wheezes, holding his side as if he's just been neatly elbowed. He most certainly has been.

"Hello," Jay says.

"Mac told you to come?"

She nods and is motioned in.

The constable stands protectively behind his wife, still wearing his police trousers as if he's just returned home. They don't ask her to sit, so she doesn't.

"What do you want?"

"I want your help," she answers, turning to him. "You were Jack Robinson's constable. You worked with him every day. You knew him." She breathes. "Was he the kind of man to do this?"

"I'm not allowed to talk about it," he answers stiffly.

"Why not?"

"Commissioner's orders," he replies flatly. "I could lose my job."

His arm comes around his wife's back as she rests her hands over the curve of her belly. Jay feels their resistance building. They have so much to lose, and the truth is sometimes such an unaffordable luxury.

So she asks the only question she has left.

"Do you think he's guilty?"

In their silence, she answers, surprising both them and herself.

"I don't."

The constable still says nothing, but his wife's face changes.

"Help me understand," Jay asks, and then a word almost unfamiliar to her.

"Please."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

It's late.

Visiting hours are long over, but she stands outside his door looking in. Jack Robinson is asleep, or doing a fine job pretending.

She hardly knows this man, yet she feels he is different. She can't say why exactly, but she just does. She is so lost in thought about him that she hadn't even heard the doctor come up behind her until she speaks.

"Hugh?"

Jay nods, turning. Under considerable duress from his wife, the constable had procured the police files for the murder, as well as the ones Detective Robinson had been working on for the last six months.

"Why do you need those files?" he'd asked.

Because everything has a past, she'd wanted to say, and I need to know his.

But she says nothing as he leaves the bulk of files with her and then disappears as if he was never there, because he never was.

It's tedious; this real work of reporting always is, sifting through the dusty backlog of the past to find those precious kernels of truth. Her eyes sting, her nose turns red, and she sneezes constantly with the dust; but she reads on.

"I know why he went to the warehouse that night."

Dr. MacMillan glances around, then takes her arm and draws her into an empty adjoining room, closing the door carefully behind them.

"The girl that he's charged with killing," Jay continues in the dim light. "Her name was Annabelle Charles. She had come to him in June when her sister Ava was found dead at South Wharf."

She takes a short breath and then continues.

"He –Detective Robinson – found three other similar suspicious deaths," she carries on. "Young girls, no families, flush with cash, suddenly found dead on the docks."

The doctor folds her arms across her chest as if to brace herself.

"The girls were drug runners, part of an opium ring here in Melbourne."

"Annabelle?"

"No," Jay says, "but her sister was, and I think she must have told her, and when her sister was found dead, Annabelle told Jack."

The still air of the room presses heavily on her skin.

"I don't think he went to that warehouse to kill Annabelle," Jay says. "I think he went there to save her."

The doctor nods and looks down as Jay speaks.

"I know how," she says, "but I don't know why."

The doctor raises her startling blue eyes.

"I need to know what happened _before_ ," Jay asks her. "I need to know why he was drunk that night."

Elizabeth MacMillan, to her credit, knows exactly what she means and does not evade it.

"She happened," the doctor answers simply, as if it is. She sits down on the edge of the empty bed, as if she herself is injured now, as if she too has been hurt by the shrapnel of unseen lives and requires treatment to draw poison from the hidden wound.

"Phryne Fisher, lady detective, my best friend."

Jay sits next to her and listens.

The Hon. Miss Phryne Fisher, even her name exotic and enticing. The dark-haired woman was terribly fashionable and unmistakably glamorous. She had come back to Melbourne in 1928, reckless now with a title and a fortune, determined to see her sister's killer brought to justice. Murdoch Foyle was, Jay remembers, thanks to the help of Detective Inspector Jack Robinson.

Phryne had stayed after that, dabbling in detective work as the year turned over into 1929. She and Jack had grown close, as the doctor remembers it, working together to solve murders at docks and dancehalls, at fashion houses and football pitches, battling Parisian artists and Russian anarchists, infiltrating circuses and brothels and magic shows (her, not him).

They were partners, but not lovers.

For Phryne, these were mutually exclusive terms; for him, they were absolutely essential.

Coming from so little and going so far, Phryne, for better or worse, would never relinquish her hard-won independence. She cherished it too much to settle with one man, with any man.

"It was hard for him, I know," the doctor says, "Terribly hard. To watch her with so many other men and never have a chance of his own."

It was the worst kind of back-handed compliment, to love him so and never have him. Phryne Fisher would share her mind with him (which she shared with no one else), but not her body (which she did).

Her heart was always – and would be – her own.

"And then she left."

Without warning or planning, Phryne Fisher flew off in September 1929, taking her father back to England without so much as a glance back.

"We never heard from her," the doctor tells her. "I wrote, I know Dottie telegrammed, and Jack – " she stops here. She doesn't have to say more but she does.

If they were hurt by this silence, he was hamstrung. It was as if a part of himself had been carved away, leaving him less of a person, leaving him desperate for any way to dull this visceral pain, this sharp and involuntary severing, to somehow unfeel the world.

He'd turned to whisky first, according to the doctor, but whisky is a fickle friend. Instead of sleep, it gave him dangerous dreams. Sometimes he'd wake in sweat, calling her name as if to bring her back. Other times, he'd wake sure she had never left, to realize only too late the cruel and empty truth.

It was a slippery slope, that descent into his own personal hell. They – herself, Hugh and his wife, the few friends he'd had – were too bound in their own grief to save him from his own. And once started, it had been impossible to stop.

Hugh had tried to cover for him as much as possible, but such intent destruction could not be hidden. There had been public remonstrance for drunkenness, two suspensions, and what was labeled as an inevitable but convenient crash, in the dark hours of August 17.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The man on the bed does not turn when she enters.

He is used to it, Jay thinks, to nameless, faceless persecutors revolving in and out of his dark dreams, the inevitable enter and exit of nurses and doctors, of prodding and poking a human husk, all that's left of a man when bones are shattered, blood is spilled, flesh battered and soul beaten.

"Tell me what happened," she asks again.

Both of Jack Robinson's eyes are open now, his bruises healing so that the colors of his face have shifted from blue-purple to yellow-green. His skin is the rather unappealing color of rotten eggs.

He doesn't move, doesn't even seem to breathe. He doesn't look at her.

"I don't know."

"I think you do," she counters, "I think you know exactly why you went to that warehouse and what you would find there."

"I don't know."

"Yes, you do."

"I don't."

"You do."

"I don't!" he roars hoarsely, anger bursting like a blister. "I don't know, and I can't remember. I killed someone and I can't remember!"

Dr. MacMillan rushes into the room, taking in the red color suffusing her patient's pale face, and then walks straight back out. The doctor knows what she does too, that there is nothing left in the pit of this man but ash and anger. And when the anger is gone, there will be precious little else.

"You don't remember because you didn't do it."

His eyes are grey-blue, Jay decides, as they settle on her, dark as a thunderstorm in the mountains.

"So tell me what you do remember," she says. "Tell me the truth."

She waits in a silence starched stiff by fear, punctured only by the rustle and remembrance of their breath. At last he speaks.

"I remember the darkness," he begins. "I remember knowing it was an opium warehouse because I could smell it, sweet, like breathing incense. I remember someone hit me as I came in, straight on the head –" he reaches up and gingerly feels his scalp where there are undoubtedly still-oozing scars. "I remember waking in a chair, tied there, and someone wanting to know who told me about the place. I remember they took the jimmy bar to my knee so I would tell them. I had a flask of whisky, and it burned when they threw it in my eyes so I would stay awake. I remember the bones popped in my fingers when they broke."

Breath rattles in his chest.

"I didn't think bones made that sound."

In the dimness of the room his bandaged hand reaches for hers. She doesn't even think he realizes he's done it, but he presses their skin together, wrapping bone into bone, so someone might believe him. His skin is dry and cold, his palm soft without calluses, as if the world has rubbed every bit of skin and scale away leaving only the rawness of his broken and bleeding heart.

"And the girl?" Jay asks softly. "Annabelle?"

"I remember they brought her in later," he continues. "I never told them, but I remember her screaming, and then – " He stops. "One shot, just one."

He looks at her now and realizes belatedly that he is holding her hand.

"I remember laughter, and then someone cut me free and put a gun in my hand. I was dizzy, I couldn't see, but I swung at them, and I thought I hit them – " he stops, flinching involuntarily. "But then I remember it felt like a razor came down my back, and it went – dark."

Jay freezes.

"Sit up," she says and surprised, he does.

Indeed the bloody bandages on his back belie his injuries, a swipe of long, deep gouges that runs from shoulder to hip. In her chest, her own heart stops, blood turning to ice in her veins.

In the thick warmth of the room she shivers.

"I never knew flesh could scream," he finishes, "and I remember thinking thank God I was dead, until I realized that I wasn't."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

In all her life, Jay Tayler has never been one to shy away from the truth, but here, now, confronted with the scabs of her own past, of everything she has tried so hard to forget, she hesitates.

And yet, she knows this: she can't go back, but she can go on. She must.

In the light of her hotel room, she unpins her hair and unfurls its long lengths.

She lets out the breath she didn't realize she'd been holding and takes up the scissors.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Get out."

The woman who ventures into the Melbourne dockside at nighttime looks nothing like the reporter who arrived in the city two weeks ago. Her face is darkened, and her razed hair greased back under a ratty tweed cap. She looks for all the world like one of the dock boys, engulfed in a dirty shirt and patched jacket – ragged, hungry, volatile, a live wire of menace and mayhem.

She yanks the man from the car without waiting and isn't at all gentle about it. He is heavy but she holds the scruff of his jacket as he stumbles out, his head swathed in a black burlap hood, his hands knotted together with rough twine.

His body sways against hers, seeking balance, and then somehow rights itself without assistance.

"Walk."

"I can't."

She hears the intransigence in his voice, and jerks the burlap from his head.

Jack Robinson blinks in the darkness as his eyes try to focus in the black alley.

Without waiting she presses a series of sharp points at the heart pumping furiously beneath his shirt. Brass knuckles rim her fingers, topped with bottle caps whose points have been filed to razor tips.

They glitter with each beat of his pulse.

He straightens as he feels the metal bite into his chest, this time pressed to the front of him rather than the back where a similar weapon has already left its vicious mark. Muscle memory is strong and undeniable; bodies remember how they have been hurt before and seek to avoid pain again.

"Walk," she says, once more.

Jay puts her hand on his arm. He can hardly move, his knee bent in a damp cast, but she spares no sympathy as she pushes him on.

"Let's go," she orders. "They're waiting."

They are, the group of them, perhaps twenty or so. The warehouse smells like rotting fish and shit, and underneath, the heady musk of dark drugs. Two boys are smoking, green at the gills with it.

She knows only the dark-haired one, her contact, and goes for him first.

"Here he is," she states, "Jack Robinson as promised."

"We'll take it from here," the boy says breezily, reaching for Jack's arm.

"That's not the deal."

She shuffles the man beside her backward so fast that his knee buckles and he rasps in pain, sagging limply against her so that she wonders for a moment if he's passed out. But he hasn't.

"I told you," she repeats clearly so that everyone can hear. "I want in."

Jay flexes the brass knuckles on her fingers and lets them glitter darkly in the light.

She hears the silence of the space roar to life. They may not know her, but they recognize this rare bright weapon, the coveted emblem of only the most prominent Black Stars, that dark and dangerous cabal of opium sellers about which the only information is that there is none at all.

"I bring your witness, you bring your leader," she says. "That was the deal."

There is a lapse, a momentary pause where life spins to a sharp focus, where everything becomes exceedingly detailed, where she can hear the idle scratch of shoe leather on cement, knows she could touch the fear as it pulses through the dark man before her, can smell the tang of hospital soap from the battered man at her side.

Jay can feel her own heart, hear the blood rushing in her head, the swirl of it screaming through her veins.

She breathes and does the impossible – she waits.

"Yes, it was indeed," says an older man at last, walking out into the light. "But I doubted you could keep up your end as promised."

Chief Commissioner Donald Davies stands before her blandly, backed by several men, two in police uniforms. She hardly knows George Sanderson's replacement, except by name and photograph in the paper, but the man next to her has worked with him and knows him far better.

"You?" Jack manages as she holds him up. "You're the – "

"For some time now," the Commissioner nods his head. "And why not? Police work surely doesn't pay as it used to."

The realization dawns late and bright in Jack's eyes.

"You killed her," he says. "Annabelle – and Ava, and all the other girls."

"She knew too much," the man answers, distinguished in his smart dark suit, "She knew the trade, she knew you , and she knew – me."

Jack swings towards him, but the Commissioner dodges away and the former detective crashes to his knees. The cast cracks opens and his scream echoes in the warehouse as the stone floor blooms poppy-red with split wounds.

"Opium is expensive," the Commissioner confirms, with a blasé shrug, "and girls are cheap."

The rumble in Jack's throat sounds like a growl, one of anger and pain.

"Did you think it was you, after all?" The Commissioner laughs. "Perhaps we did our job well enough then, if only you hadn't remembered it was us."  
"But I didn't – "

Jay cuts him off.

"Tell me about the opium."

"We run it, and it makes us rich," he responds. "What else do you need to know?"

She doesn't need to know anything more. She knows it all already and far too well.

"I know it kills," Jay answers. "As do you."

The room freezes, air pulled so taut that it must nearly crystallize between them, that it must harden so as even emptiness can be broken.

"Do I know you?" Davies asks, peering closely at her.

She smiles disarmingly.

"You should," she replies. "Because I know you."

Now Jay feels all eyes upon her, including the heavy weight of Jack Robinson's as he finally recognizes her, as he realizes who she is, and that she is not, could not be, the innocent reporter he'd thought.

"We met on a night like this in Sydney, don't you remember?"

She moves closer to Davies.

"I was one of those girls," she declares. "And you tried to kill me too."

The Commissioner stands back and considers her. She holds his gaze even though it's like looking into the devil's eyes and seeing hell.

"Ah, yes," he sees at last. "You were Lee Turner's little wildcat."

She nods. "I was the one that got away."

"But not before I marked you first."

At her feet, Jack winces, perhaps feeling his own scars, the marks raked down his back as he looks at the sharpened knuckles on Jay's hand, and the larger ones Davies spins slowly around his own fingers, points black and sticky with opium – or old blood.

The Commissioner rocks back on his feet.

"Lee was a troublemaker, you know," he announces. "He didn't like using the girls. He stopped the Hongkong routes and threatened to go to the cops." He shakes his head. "It was very bad for business. I had no choice but to kill him and start over here."

"The same as you killed all those young girls?"

He leers towards her but she doesn't move away.

"The same, I expect, as I'll kill you."

"You can try again," Jay says graciously, and smiles at him as if she means it. "But you're not very good at it."

She doesn't even hesitate as she swings, knuckles cased in brass smashing into the smirk on his face. She doesn't break his jaw (at least she doesn't think so), but certainly it rattles a few molars as the spikes shred though the flesh of his check and sink deep into his gums. Blood spurts from his ripped mouth, his split nose, from the lip that will heal crooked, as he falls.

Now he too will be forever marked.

At his scream Hugh Collins and every police officer of the Victoria police come flooding into the space, shouting and surrounding them in general chaos.

The young City South constable comes over and yanks Davies to his feet.

"Did you get all that?" Jay asks him.

"Every word," Hugh answers.

"Good," she replies. "Because I'm going to write about it."

Blood drips from her hand onto the white press of the Commissioner's shirt as she smiles into his mangled face.

"I promise you I'm going to write all about it."

"Bitch."

"Not killing me was your first mistake," she tells him. "Not killing him – " she points to Jack, still on the floor, " – was your second."

"And, truth be told," Jay finishes, "I'm glad you made both."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"How is he?"

Jack's eyes roll open as Dr. MacMillan bends over him, checking his pulse.

Shock, the doctor had confirmed, along with a good bit of blood loss and overexertion. She's re-sewn his stitches, scrubbed his wounds against infection, and topped him off with a strong dose of morphine.

"He'll live."

Is that all, Jay wonders. Is it enough?

The hospital whirls quietly around them. On the outside, Jack Robinson seems no worse for the wear. But on the inside, Jay knows, is another story.

The doctor tosses her stethoscope around her neck. She touches Jay's shoulder gently, and they move to leave as he is pulled to sleep, lids and dark lashes sliding over his ash and ocean eyes.

"Don't go," he says suddenly, struggling awake and reaching for her. "Please."

Dr. MacMillan shrugs and then leaves them alone, closing the door behind her.

Jay comes back to the bed, resting her hands on the cool railing.

She thinks he will look at her differently now, that he must as everyone else has. But he doesn't, and when he speaks, it isn't at all what she expected.

"Your hair," he says.

"It will grow," she answers, feeling the short ragged ends, because sometimes bodies recover so easily when our minds and hearts do not.

"I like it."

It's just the medicine speaking, Jay knows, but she smiles at the small kindness of his words.

"How did you know?" he asks.

The smile fades as she wonders how to answer his question, as she wonders if she even can.

"We all have scars," she says in the end. "It's just that most people can't see them."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

A week later Jack Robinson is a free man.

It is a miracle few people, if any, thought would come to pass, so there's a general air of upendedness about it, about where he's going, and where he'll stay. According to Dr. MacMillan, with whom no one dares argue, he'll stay in the hospital for the next several weeks to allow his knee to heal as best it might, which is to say, not very.

Jay seems to have started a chain reaction in the press, with every two-dog-town newspaper sending their agents for the scoop. So far, they have all failed where the _Herald_ has been triumphant. Reporters, even the clever ones, have found themselves barred from the hospital (except the one that tried to climb a ladder to the detective's second story room, falling off and breaking his arm in ignominy). She, however, has been able to waltz right in, so four of her exposés have appeared the last week alone, including an exclusive interview with the man of the hour himself (even if he didn't know he was being interviewed at the time).

A crowd waits impatiently at the front entrance, but she knows where to go; she knows his secrets.

Dr. MacMillan appears at the back door and holds it open as an attendant wheels out the former detective, rolling him down the winding pathway to where she is waiting on a bench in the October sun.

"Avoiding the press?" she asks as the attendant parks him into place.

"What have you done?" he asks in serious consternation. The bruises on his face have almost faded completely to the odd yellow-brown of winter potatoes. He is dressed in trousers and a pull-over, so that an onlooker might think him completely healed. They would be so wrong, though, Jay knows, because the real healing has yet to come, if even it can.

"Normally people say thank you in these situations," she says, "so, you're welcome."

Jack flaps open the Sydney _Herald_ , as if she didn't know what it already says.

 _Melbourne Police Detective Receives Victoria Star for Bravery_ , it reads. The charges against Jack Robinson have been dropped, the opium ring destroyed, the Commissioner imprisoned. Justice has been attained, as much as it might ever be.

"The Mayor came," he tells her. "Even the Governor!"

She knows all this, has already put it into print, so she waits for him to continue.

"They called me a hero."

She hears the bitterness in his voice.

"Perhaps you are."

"I'm not," he refutes, "And I don't deserve it."

"Bravery is in the eye of the beholder."

They sit in silence for a moment, listening to the crash of garbage being collected, of laundry being loaded into vans, of deliveries of medicine and flowers. Two corpses are brought out on stretchers and loaded into a hearse for burial.

"I did what anyone would do," Jacks says at last, the sun bright on his pale skin.

"No," Jay answers him. "You did what no one would do."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	5. Thursday's Child

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 5: Thursday's Child

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: Thank you to all my steadfast and supportive readers. For those worrying about Phryne: fear not. She has her own story and her own reasons, which she will share in a later chapter.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / December 1930 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

Jack Robinson is released from the hospital on a sunny day just before Christmas 1930.

His knee isn't fully healed – it might never be – so he relies on crutches. They are damned precarious things and he despises them ardently. Even the shortest excursions leave him winded and dizzy, so living in his three-story walk-up in Richmond, where he grew up, is out of the question.

He moves – or rather, is moved - to a bungalow in Elwood. He can hardly afford this section of town, and the house reflects the low asking price.

Outside the tiny yard is a riot of overgrown golden wattle and bottlebrush, a startling contusion of red and yellow that brings bees he can hear even at night. Inside the paint is peeling, the floorboards uneven, and the windows rattle at the faintest hint of wind. The house has obviously seen better days, but then so has he.

It comes to him quite clearly: he is not a hero; he is a cripple.

The shock of it overwhelms him. He doesn't know himself, doesn't know the world without his work in it. The days seem endless, the nights worse. In the darkness he can't sleep, and everything – even breathing – hurts.

He isn't sure he can survive – in fact, he doesn't want to.

Then she comes.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The sun is bright on the day she walks up the overgrown path to his porch.

Jack is sitting on the tilted and rickety porch swing, his leg outstretched on the broken railing, a beer in hand rather than coffee. It's after noon (at least, he thinks, it must be), but he's just gotten up, shoving off the lumpy sofa where he sleeps (if he does). He wants to, but so many nights, he can't, thrashing against new pain and old dreams. He takes the pills Mac gave him because it is easy, washed down with whisky, and later hates himself for it. He doesn't know how to survive otherwise, clawing himself from day to day. Besides, it doesn't really matter, he's found, when your days consist of limping from bed to seat to toilet and back again. The change in space doesn't affect his bitter perception of the world.

Jack Robinson has escaped the large injuries so miraculously that he'd forgotten how much the little ones still hurt. Released from the larger catastrophe of murder charges, he'd failed in remembering the smaller but no less significant wreck of his life before them. If he was not to blame for the former, he must be for latter.

He'd forgotten that his life had been a tragedy that was no less catastrophic, or perhaps, a catastrophe that was no less tragic.

He had forgotten, but it comes back to ravage him now.

He'd begun drinking soon after Phryne left, at first just a tumbler at the end of the day because she wasn't there to share it with him. He'd missed her, the sound of her voice down hallways, the twitch of her head and curl of her smile, the smell of her Floris perfume as her body pressed against. Then, when he couldn't sleep, when he couldn't forget, he drank more.

He ended up drinking quite a lot.

Now he doesn't even have his job to keep him sane, so perhaps he isn't. He falls back into those bad habits, perhaps without meaning to, perhaps without trying not to. He'd do anything to stop thinking, to stop remembering what's past, what's gone, what can never come back – his knee, his heart, Phryne.

But in the end, he knows it's a losing venture.

He knows he's can't.

A storm had passed through the night before, sweeping the sky so clean that the light stings his eyes. He squints as this woman comes to him now, her short hair blazoned with sun and shine. She is wrapped in a halo of light, hair blonde, dress blue, a walking piece of the world that has left him behind, or that he has left it.

Jay Tayler climbs the steps to the porch and stands before him.

He hasn't seen her in – well, he can't remember. Time seems to have slipped away from him somehow, blustery spring turning into blazing summer. He's only been out of the hospital for a few weeks, but it seems like a year, this escape from one purgatory to the next.

It seems like all of eternity.

He'd assumed she'd gone back to Sydney, someone else to flit in and out of the shreds of his life. After all, what was there to keep you in Melbourne when the rest of the world beckons?

The reporter doesn't say anything at first, but peers in the dusty window, pushing aside the branches of wattle, golden and fluffy with flowers. If she can see anything through the marred glass, she will see only mismatched pieces of furniture and unpacked boxes, his life left in jumbled and unlabeled cardboard containers.

When she finally looks at him, leaning against the cracked balustrade, her eyes are so hard it hurts.

"Is this what you're going to do with your life?"

Jack feels her disappointment. He wonders if he looks worse than when she saw him last, when he was in the hospital, if that is even possible. His bruises may have faded, but he hasn't shaved and his rough beard must rival only the tangled thicket of his unkempt hair. Only a patterned bathrobe hides the rest of him, the bone-and-reed husk of who he once was. Still he can't bring himself to care even under the scrutiny of her leaf and thunder eyes.

"What am I supposed to do?"

He gestures with his half-empty beer at the crutches, at a world he can no longer reach. No one asked him if he wanted to live, if he wanted to be saved, which, Jack thinks, is unfair, because he never decided he did and now he is stuck with it, with life.

"Besides," he asks crossly, "who are you to care?"

She doesn't answer but propels herself upright with such ease that he is jealous.

"Come with me," she says suddenly, "and I'll tell you."

Immediately he wants to say no, to refuse, but there's something in him, some old and latent spark, that resists, that refuses to be broken.

"Come," she says, more softly, and offers him her hand. "Come with me."

He takes it and she pulls him towards her, upwards on such a graceful arc of gravity and hope that he realizes she has created a miracle, of him standing on his own two feet.

He shuffles inside and stands in the dim room, perplexed and terrified now that he has agreed. He has no idea where his things are, but he upends the nearest box and finds a pair of trousers and a shirt he hopes is less rumpled than it looks (he fears he's bound for disappointment there). Quickly he brushes his teeth and rakes his fingers through his hair, though he isn't sure it helps.

His stubble glints grey in the light as he comes back out. (He certainly doesn't trust himself with a razor.)

"Let's go," she says before he can refuse.

He sways forward on her irrepressible energy, leaning heavily on his crutches. His farthest walk since he left the hospital has been from the cab to his front room. He isn't sure he can manage the porch stairs, much less any farther than that.

Yet she steps forward and the distance between them yawns as a chasm.

"Thursday's child," she says as he wavers.

"What?"

"You asked who I was," the reporter answers and from the back places of his memory he remembers the rhyme.

"I was born in North Carolina, in America, on Thursday, October 10, 1902."

She moves and he follows, reciting the words in his head. Monday's child was fair of face, Tuesday's child full of grace. He forgets what the future held for anyone born on Wednesday, but she, as Thursday's child, would have far to go.

His first step is agony, and every one thereafter more unbearable. By the fifth step he's sure he isn't going to make it. They haven't even reached the road yet, but her back is to him, her face to the sun and the water in front of them, the smell of it sweet with salt.

"I don't remember my mother," she says and keeps moving, always just out of reach so he has no choice but to try. "She left when I was four."

She talks and he hobbles, and somehow they make it to beach café on the Ormond Esplanade. They sit (she disdainfully, as if she hates the thought of being immobile; him gratefully, because he hates the thought of getting up again).

She orders him black coffee and a hot pie with lamb mince. She sips tea and watches the ocean behind him. He wipes at the sweat on his face, twitching his shoulder as it drips coldly down his spine. His back, the band of his trousers, is soaked with it. By contrast, his knee feels like it's on fire, skin and bone burning like the throbbing in his head, so violent he feels nauseous with it.

He wishes for the bottle of pills; he wishes for a bottle of whisky.

He wishes Jay Tayler would keep talking, and then she does.

The reporter tells him about her childhood, what she remembers of it, the thick southern heat and sugar-sweet tea, the Spanish moss and flame azaleas, the nights so hazy and deep you could fall through darkness and never stop. Tansy Tayler had married at age eighteen, to defy her strict Southern Baptist parents and because she was already four months' pregnant. Her husband Robert was solid Australian stock. He had gone to California to work for the railroads and had somehow worked his way backward to the east coast, "manifest destiny" in reverse. What had begun with enchantment ended with soiled diapers, curdled milk, and soot that left black marks on everything, even her baby skin. As a child, she remembers little except fragments of broken crockery and the soft voice of the sheriff trying to explain that her mother was gone. She hears the words but they don't fit; she can't make sense of them. She won't be able to, not until another muddle of years passes, and the sheriff returns, repeating the same thing about her father. Even at such a young age, she realizes something very clearly: she realizes that being gone is worse than death.

It's the not knowing that hurts so badly.

Jack looks up. His plate is empty, vanished clean but for a few crumbs, his coffee having been refilled twice, her tea refreshed once, though the bottoms of their cups are long since dry.

"What happened then?" he asks.

"Then," she answers, "is another story."

"I have time."

His answer surprises them both. It's the first glimmer of interest he's felt in ages.

It is something, it is everything.

"Lunch, then," she says, and smiles. "Thursday?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Ready?"

She shows up precisely as promised, the noonday Thursday heat rolling over them softly. January 1931 has dawned clear and hopeful. The sky is scudded with clouds today, the heavens above gingham in white and blue.

Jack has been ready since she asked, having managed both bathing and shaving with a fairly steady hand. He is relieved that she doesn't peek through the window to see the wreckage of upturned boxes, of clothes and books and kitchen utensils scattered within, evidence of his struggle to excavate the respectable suits he used to wear (though they no longer fit as he remembered).

"Yes."

He leans on his crutches and pushes himself forward.

"I arrived in Australia in 1909," she begins as they start down the street, shade trees billowing overhead. Canary Island date palms and London planes whirl in the breeze, shadows sliding like kaleidoscopes. "Quite against my wishes, if anyone cared, which they didn't."

They walk past the café on the esplanade – she didn't care for the cake, she says – until they find another further along on St. Kilda Street, across from Elsternwick Park and the cricket club.

She says she barely remembers the long trip by ship, possibly because she's deemed a wildcat, a hellion, and sent to her tiny cubicle below deck so often that there are whole days she isn't allowed to venture out.

"Why can't you be a lady?" she is asked.

"Because it's a man's world," Jay answers.

All too soon and not quickly enough, the ship arrives at port. She doesn't know what to expect when she walks down the long plank to the dock and her new life. She certainly doesn't expect this silent, white-haired man who had never been farther from Canberra than Sydney in his life, her grandfather, Thomas Tayler.

She grows up on a cattle station with a kindness and freedom she never imagined. She can't imagine borders or boundaries, because here there are none, or they are so far away as to be imaginary. Her hair grows long and tangled, her skin glows brown, her eyes simmer into the peculiar grey-green sheen of eucalyptus mist in the mountains.

Her grandfather isn't given to conversation, and knows nothing about the proper raising of a seven year-old girl, so instead of sailor dresses and summer frocks for boarding school, he gives her a boy's britches, a horse and work. He teaches her how to shoot, how to tie the lash of a whip so it cracks like the world breaking in two, how to deal with the sharp things of life like barbed wire and flick knives, like silence and solitude. Her school is the outdoors, her lessons by correspondence, her only friends the brittle books in her grandfather's parlor.

It ends with her grandfather's death in 1915, two days after her thirteenth birthday and two months before the last Australian troops are evacuated from Gallipoli (a young Lance Corporal John Robinson being one). She couldn't have known how far in debt they were, how cattle sales had plummeted in the years since she arrived, but she was duly informed by a solicitor unimpressed with his penniless young charge, soon deposited, amidst biting, kicking, and as much unladylike language as he hopes ever to hear in his life, to a charity school in Canberra. It will be her home for the next two years of her life.

"And then?" Jack asks.

The ocean wind has gotten cooler; there's another storm blowing over the water. He can feel it in his bones as she shivers.

"And then there was trouble."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Jack Robinson wakes and realizes he is not unhappy. It's grey as dishwater outside, a ragged veil of rain and fog dripping miserably over the earth, but he can't wait to get up.

It's Thursday.

He looks forward to lunch with Jay Tayler.

He swings his legs to the side of the lumpy sofa. The one twinges, but he stands and walks through the pain. Every day is a bit less; every day is a little better. It isn't easy, but what in life is?

As he moves, he thinks about the blonde reporter.

He likes that she is honest and brave. He likes her short yellow hair and eucalyptus eyes, the way she smiles when she thinks no one's looking, the way she laughs when she knows he is. He likes that she doesn't push people, but pulls them instead, drawing them to her on invisible silken ties.

He is pulled.

It takes time but they find a café they both like – he for the shepherd's pie, and she for the pavlova – on Ruskin Street. They become on first-name basis with the owners, Paul and Hilda, and each other.

"Call me Jack," he says as rain patters overhead, with a perfect sense of déjà vu. "Everyone does."

Her smile holds even as she hesitates.

"Call me Jessa, then," she replies. "No one does anymore."

He hears the last word, the soft way she shares this with him, her name.

"Jessa," he says, letting her name roll over his tongue. "Jessa called Jay."

She's been just Jay for so long that she hardly remembers being called otherwise, but her name sounds so beautiful in his voice.

"Tell me what happened."

He echoes the words she spoke to him in the hospital room.

She hasn't spoken of her past since their conversation several weeks ago, but he wants to know.

It takes longer but she tells him what she means by trouble, what it is to a young girl left alone in the world.

While ANZAC forces flail in the mud of the Western front, at Menin Road, Polygon Wood, and Passchendaele in 1917, a young Jessa Tayler escapes into the Canberra streets.

It begins to simply enough, in juvenile rebellion and misplaced grief. She doesn't fit in at the charity school, knowing too much and perhaps too little, more advanced in lessons than the spinster teachers but ignorant in the groupthink of girls. They don't like her, and she doesn't like them. They tease and tattle until she retaliates, sneaking nettles in the smalls drawer, laundry blue in the showerheads, slugs into their bedsheets.

She virtually lives in the solitary room (which she doesn't mind at all) and is stripped of meal privileges (which she does). Her stomach grumbles as she jimmies the window as usual and climbs out.

She has done this many times before, but tonight it is different. Tonight she lands on her feet and doesn't look back.

Here, there is the pull of the unknown, and the push of boundaries once crossed never gone back. She doesn't understand these lines of demarcation well enough, she will think later. She doesn't yet know that there are invisible borders that keep things in as much as they keep them out.

So she escapes into Fyshwick, the industrial part of town, where boys and old men (for all those in between are fighting the war) trudge back and forth in pre-arranged patterns of misery. Here, she knows, there is suffering that makes hers pale by comparison.

Her stomach growls ravenously as she looks towards the pie cart at the end of the street, even though she knows she has no money and she knows the pie man has a revolver.

She begins to move anyway until a hand holds her back.

Jay looks up into the face of a young man with bright eyes and russet hair. She's seen him before, loping in the streets, doing nothing yet seeing everything.

She doesn't know his name, but she knows he's a smuggler. It's all the talk of the news, of the headmistress loudly at tea, of the girls in whispers at night. They know little more than what they hear, but when she'd first arrived at the charity school, one of the older residents had procured a packet of cigarettes laced with opium. The heady fumes swirled around the room, and within a week she was gone. The girls tell that she was unceremoniously ejected onto the street, but Jay thinks she must have left of her own accord, because anything is better than this anchorite half-life.

Two policemen amble up the street, chatting as they come. They pass by every night, patrolling for illicit trade, be it drugs, women, or homemade brews. They exchange quick greetings with the pie man, unsuspecting, even as another line of other men come up behind, carrying large crates and slipping into the building behind them. They file inside unseen until a crash mars the night.

The policemen immediately turn and walk forward.

Beside her the man with the fox-colored hair stiffens, fingers biting into her shoulder.

There are moments when life becomes clear, when it is impossible to look back and understand why we do the things we do, how we understood to do them so quickly. Jessa will look back and think that as she runs forward, bumping between both the officers and snatching a pie from the cart. The pie man's angry bellow follows her, and the two officers yell out, swinging their batons. She darts into an alley and lets them rush past, heart whumping in her chest so hard she almost see stars. When the night is clear, she slips out, devouring the cooling pie. Her only regret is that she didn't grab more.

She makes her way back to the main street. The pie man is gone, but the young smuggler is standing outside the red building, smoking. Tendrils slip up into the night like patterns of lace.

"Quick thinking," he says as she leans against the wall next to him.

She nods but doesn't speak.

"Lee Turner," he says, holding out his hand.

"Jay Tayler," she answers, taking it.

He considers her carefully.

"Want a job?"

It's really just that easy, a simple nod of her head. Lee gives her directions, she follows them. She begins running for him, taking messages and packages from place to place. She knows what's in them, the sticky black opium balls, the dark bottles of morphine labeled as laudanum, the crisp packets of heroin, shipped secretly from China, but she doesn't ask.

The market has never been better. By 1918, the soldiers begin to return home, wounded, shattered, desperate. They form a bulk of new clients, along with women whose men do not return, whose grief might be alleviated by the dark liquids of a stoppered bottle. Jay can't bring herself to think this trade wrong, not when it provides such relief.

Soon Lee takes her with him to Sydney, where trade is booming. She knows no one here, but she knows him, and that is enough. The unimposing young man with the red hair and stained-glass eyes, with that indifferent swagger and off-tune whistle, is the head of the celestial-sounding Black Stars, one of the most powerful opium importers and smuggling operations between Hongkong and the Australian coast. Every boat that comes in brings their product, and their networks slips from dockside to cityscape like blood vessels from a beating heart.

The trade is illegal, and life here is nothing if not precarious. All it takes is a freak slip on the wharf or a few grains more of white powder, though more likely a chance meeting with a gang rival in a dark warehouse. So they carry special weapons, these Black Stars, bottles caps soldered to brass knuckles, and they use them, brandished politely if possible, applied viciously if necessary. Their enemies are marked by sliced flesh, lacerated cheeks through which sometimes teeth and even tongue are visible.

Lee twirls the metal around his hand as they walk, letting the spikes glitter in the light.

Tonight his men unload another shipment, nails squealing as crates are jacked open. Lee inspects the contents as several others test the product. Together they lean against a railing as he watches, his hip, his elbow, his knee to hers. Jay feels the rub of corduroy press into her skin, the sinuous outline of the knuckles in his pocket. The edge of his hand brushes hers, the bent line of his broken pinky warm on her cool skin as he weaves their fingers together.

The men's eyes are dark and wide as they hold out their pipes in the haze.

Perhaps at one time she would have tried one, but now she shakes her head and they go out into the street where they breathe.

"All drugs are dangerous," Lee says as the sun rolls over the edge of the world.

He pulls her towards him.

"Some are worth it," he continues, bringing his lips to hers once and then again, "And some aren't."

She swirls in his arms as they leave.

Love is the most addictive drug of all.

As the leaders of the world begin to meet at Versailles to dictate the peace in January 1919, something changes in Sydney. She can't say what it was, even now. The market shifts, scrabbles and then suffers. The trade changes subtly. The customers grow younger, and so do the runners. Everyone she knew from when she began is gone. Only she is left; perhaps by chance, perhaps by grace.

Furrows grow in Lee's brow.

"How old are you?" he asks one night.

"Almost seventeen."

"The girl that died yesterday was only fifteen."

The one before was two years younger, and she, someone who has lived hundreds of days more than that, suddenly feels old by comparison. Five have died in the last three weeks, two by overdose, three in prison cells.

"What do we do?" he asks into the darkness.

She knows he isn't expecting an answer, but she has one anyway, the only one she has ever known.

"Fight back."

He pulls her against him and holds her there.

"You're so different," he says in wonder. "Nothing scares you, not even life."

So she isn't scared when he wakes her in the dark one night.

"Come with me," he orders and of course she does.

They wind through the maze of the docks until he stops outside a warehouse she doesn't recognize.

"Take these," he orders, slipping the metal knuckles into her pocket. He pulls out a revolver, releasing the cylinder and checking the rounds within. He snaps the cylinder back into place and tucks the gun into the waistband of his trousers.

Wordlessly she follows him into the darkness, sliding her fingers into the cold metal of his knuckles.

Three police officers are waiting as they step into the light. Lee greets them, and she realizes belatedly that they too are part of the Stars, the ones that look the other way when dark boats come to the docks, who overlook certain buildings on raids, who pocket extra cash at the end of every month.

"We have to stop this," Lee begins. "It's wrong. They're only children."

The older cop, the one standing in the center, laughs, a harsh dry sound that makes her twitch as he steps forward.

"And you're only in my way."

It happens so fast she hardly realizes it. She sees Lee reach for his gun the same time that the cop on the left goes for her, slamming her backwards against the wall so that her head ricochets against the brick. Teeth crunch into her tongue and blood floods her mouth; she chokes, panics and tries to spit it out. The world wavers, turning sideways and fuzzy, as Lee fires at the cop on the right. Only then does the older cop raises his revolver, aiming at Lee even as she tries to scream. The sound echoes – it will stay with her for the rest of her life – as she watches him fall.

The younger cop drags her upwards, pinning her.

"Get rid of her," the man orders as he kicks Lee's body.

She doesn't even think but slams her fist forward, towards his jaw, but he sees her coming and ducks. It is too late. The sharpened teeth sink deep into the curve of his throat and he screams, the sound burbling from his chest. She's never sure if she intended it, but she rips sideways as he falls, the metal teeth slicing through skin and flesh and vein. For a moment he stands there, pressing a hand to his neck. Then suddenly blood gushes out, pulsing outward in great arterial spurts that slosh over her.

He turns his tortured face to her and she runs.

The dark policeman looks up too late, rising only as she reaches the door. Yet he moves fast and as she slides around the corner, she feels the bite of his own sharpened knuckles as they descend like a terrible talon, ripping through her shirt and carving deep ruts in her skin of her back.

But then she is through, running out, running away, running until she can no longer run any more.

She wakes up days later, restrained in a dim hospital ward, her wrists chained to the bed, charged with murder. Fight back, she'd told Lee, but it is the word of the police against her own and who can fight that?

Jessa stops there and Jack waits in her silence.

In the café Hilda is whistling as she dries plates with a white cloth. One slips; the shatter reverberates but the blonde doesn't even flinch.

Hilda sweeps up the pieces, edges screeching against the tiled floor as Jessa rises.

Jack feels her distance like an open wound.

This woman's broken pieces, so beautiful concealed, so artfully hidden, are far more jagged than shattered porcelain. She has become a master at hiding them, at pushing them deeper into herself, deeper to her bruised and bleeding heart, so that no one looking at her might even guess at her rough and ragged past. Can we ever be put together again, Jack wonders and then thinks, what faith, what absolute faith, she must have that he of all people can be.

Later he will pull strings (what few he has left) to have her juvenile report sent to Melbourne. The young girl that stares up at him from the grainy picture is so different than the woman he now knows, so different and yet exactly the same.

Jessa's mug shot is the opposite of Phryne's. Jack remembers in frustration booking Phryne Fisher on trumped-up charges after the murder at the Green Mill, coming through on his threats for her intervention, watching as she hammed it up for the camera. Her mirth couldn't be more different than Jessa, young and pale and blazing with unconcealed defiance, dark blood no longer visible on her hands as she holds her number, but there nonetheless.

It's a terrible toll, he knows, to kill someone. It's not something he's sure Phryne ever really understood, swishing around her little golden gun. Shooting someone lacks the punch of killing up close. Whether a slit throat or a bayonet to the gut, it is war all the same, violence brought home and made personal, not distant. You feel the blood on your hands, and you always will.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

It's a week before Jessa comes back, but she does and she is not alone.

A wizened man with a bulging tool kit and cap the color of mushy peas bounds up beside her. He comes only to her shoulder, but he has the solid air of a carpenter, of someone who can fix things, who can even make them anew, stained hands and smell of wood grained into his skin. He must be seventy if he's a day, but his toothless grin pretends he isn't a lad over twenty.

"This is trouble?" he asks her.

"No, this is Alfred James."

"Alfie," the man says, doffing his cap, and shaking Jack's hand vigorously.

"This is the man who is going to make you some bookshelves."

She'd asked him about that, he remembers, asked him if he liked books. He'd said no, he liked words, one which led to another, by force or magic. She answered she liked the same thing.

Jessa smiles as she brushes by him, directing Alfie inside. He feels the currents of air as she passes, feels as if he could reach out and put his fingers to the scent of her as if to hold her there against him.

After a single glance Alfie explains exactly what needs to be done, how to reshape his rooms, his walls, so his books can live there instead in shaky stacks on the floor. Jack agrees to everything the man says, if only so Jessa will turn her face again, to smile just for him.

"You don't remember, do you?" she asks as they walk, leaving Alfie whistling "Waltzing Matilda" behind them, happily ensconced with measuring tape and leveling tool.

"Remember what?"

"You saved him," she says, "Alfie."

"I did?" Jack questions in surprise.

"Yes," she replies. "He was charged with a bank robbery in 1926, but you found him innocent of the charge. You believed in him when no one else did."

She looks over at him.

"You saved him."

"And you?" Jack asks. "Who saved you?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"I was seventeen years-old and wanted to die."

Jessa's words are calm, but Jack feels the raggedness behind them. She stirs sugar into her tea in measured figure eights, the spoon never hitting the edges of the porcelain cup.

"At least, I didn't want to live," she continues. "Didn't think I could."

God, Jack thinks, he knows that feeling well enough.

A waiter sets down his coffee and a passionfruit pavlova for Jessa. A storm blew through the night, leaving sunny skies that make the sugar sparkle.

"And then he came."

The meringue cracks under her spoon.

Will Baker, reporter for the Canberra _Chronicle_ , appeared in her hospital room, vivid and bright despite his dark hair and olive skin. She was on suicide watch, having threatened a nurse with a needle and attempted to cut her own wrists with a fork.

"Talk to me," he'd said, and somehow she found her voice. He was the first person to ask; he was the only one who'd cared. Once started she couldn't stop talking and he didn't stop writing. The pages of the _Chronicle_ are filled with her words.

"I never knew that a story could change the world."

She takes a breath.

"It changed mine."

To be saved, Jack knows, is a miraculous experience.

In the end, the words do matter. The police are investigated, two other smuggling rings broken, but the cop who killed Lee is gone. Jay Tayler is not charged as an adult, but given a year of juvenile detention back in Canberra. She goes to bed each night convinced she will die; she wakes up each morning surprised. So she bares her teeth, she throws her elbows, she survives.

She is released on a rainy day in July 1921.

The sum total of her worldly possessions consists of three set of smalls, two socks, a pair of men's field boots, and a cotton dress with an uneven hemline. She does not own an umbrella, so rain splatters down on her bare head, her newly long hair, as she walks out.

She has no idea where she's going, but there is a car waiting on the other side of the wire and she goes to it out of curiosity rather than expectation.

The window rolls down and Will Baker's face appears.

"Get in," he says cheerfully, and she does.

He hires her for a year's work experience at the _Chronicle_. She follows Will where he goes; she learns what he does. She begins to see the world through the eyes of others. She learns how to describe things simply; she learns how to explain the unexplainable.

Slowly but surely her life is turned around. She starts writing about crime instead of living it. She becomes a survivor, not a victim.

By nineteen she is a Junior Correspondent to his Senior Reporter. Will is striking and charismatic, and she falls in love with him, as do most women, as a matter of course. When she kisses him on assignment, he does not turn her away; when he invites her to his bed, she does not refuse.

She begins to imagine a life in front of her, instead of one behind her. But her vision is cruelly shattered when Will takes a position as Far East Correspondent for the London _Times_ in Hongkong. He does not tell her; he does not ask her to go. One day he is simply gone.

Jack hears the outrage still in her voice, the fury of someone in despair of a world so carefully created left in tatters and ruins.

"It wasn't – easy," Jessa says at last. "But I didn't die."

She exhales.

"I stayed and I survived."

The world has tried to swallow this woman whole, and she made it spit her out again. Jack imagines if anyone had a right to remain bitter and unreformed, it would be Jay Tayler. And yet somehow she found that there was something that could do more damage than weapons, something that could heal more deeply than medicine.

Somehow she found words.

By the time she turns twenty she has become the assistant editor at the Canberra _Chronicle_ , the same year a war-changed Jack Robinson faced the 1923 police strike in Melbourne.

By twenty-six, Jay Tayler has become a reporter with the Sydney _Herald_ ; that year, 1928, a dark-haired woman returns to Melbourne to prosecute her sister's killer.

That year Jack Robinson meets Phryne Fisher.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Somehow people begin piling up at his door.

Alfie brings Sid Robertson, a plumber. Sid recruits Walter and Joseph, painters. Then comes Max Cooper, the roofer, who brings his son and nephew. Sid asks Harry Hunter to look after the wiring and the lights. Alfie brings Benjie Mason to help with the kitchen cabinets, and instructs his son-in-law to sand and refinish a bed, two bureaus, and a lovely driftwood table that Jack has somehow acquired.

Now those he has saved begin to save him.

All of these people – so carefully researched and located by Jessa, so generous and enthusiastic with their labor – have somehow been affected by him, by what he's done. He saved Alfie from unwarranted charges of theft, found the man who kidnapped Sid's daughter (safely returned), prosecuted the union boss who harassed Walter and Joseph. Benjie remembers his kindness when his mother's brother was booked on assault, Max the relief (if not peace) when his father's murderer was caught in 1929.

Perhaps, Jack begins to believe, he has done some good in this world.

He sees Jessa almost every day now, and when they walk to lunch, he uses only a sturdy cane. They laugh and talk about books and films, about nothing that matters and everything important, until they return to his home, hazy with wood dust and electric with the smell of drying varnish. They linger on the porch until she says good-night.

Jack doesn't realize how much he wants her to stay until he watches her walk away.

On the weekends, his house becomes a revolving hive of activity. Jessa calls in the reserves – Hugh and Dottie – to help supervise. Hugh takes the interior, Jessa the exterior, and Dottie colonizes the kitchen to help feed the army of help that continually shows up every morning, punctually and cheerfully.

Jack helps where he can, sanding, painting, holding, fetching. He understands now, a little, the relief of these men, not just financially, but in being useful again, in being needed.

He helps Jessa in the yard, pruning and clearing brush, not just because he likes gardening but because he likes being close to her. He forgets he needs the cane; or rather, he finds he doesn't need it after all. They excavate his porch from the profusion of wattle and bottlebrush, limiting the enthusiasm of the trumpet creeper with vengeful cutting. In a far corner they find an old fig tree blooming happily; Jessa picks off two of the dark fruit and they stand in the sun to suck out the sweet flesh. Later they discover a family of fruit bats under his eaves, crashing into each other when the first inhabitants scuttle out in a mad rush of dark wings; he holds on to her well after they have disappeared into the sky.

As they settle back onto their own feet, she points to the edge of the house where a silvery cobweb glints in the sunshine. She reaches out and touches the sticky corner with her finger. Ripples run throughout the silken strands but still the black spider at its center does not move.

She isn't afraid, Jack thinks, she truly isn't. Phryne would have been; she would have run away screaming, she would have been in his arms.

He thinks maybe this strange and beautiful woman might yet be.

He hopes.

"Sometimes we can't be afraid," Jessa says without looking at him, "Of things bigger than ourselves."

She pulls her finger against the web, letting it tremble without her touch.

(He does too.)

Only now does she look over, her eyes steady on his.

"Don't you think?"

They have been born in different centuries, he and this woman. They have seen different things. And yet somehow they see eye to eye.

He feels her now, like he's never felt anyone else. It's an awareness, a heightened alertness. He feels her just before she turns the corner of Vautier Street and he sees her coming towards him; his stomach tightens when she sits next to him, crosses her legs, and the cap of her knee flips in the light.

He feels her and he hasn't even touched her.

Jack lets himself go to her now, spun out of his own web. Her hands come to his face and he is held between the very fingers that have written so much about him, that he thinks still have so much more yet to write. She's right here, right in front of him, and all he wants is to kiss her and all he's thinking is why he didn't do this before.

"Jay!" They both jump, a little, as Dottie calls. "Jay, where are you?"

"Here," she answers softly, her eyes still on his, "Where I've always been."

Then she calls back to Dottie and Jack watches her go, feeling the loss.

Now, as the darkness drapes down on them like crepe, she comes to the porch and sits on the swing beside him. Her twill cavalry pants and low boots are brushed with dirt; she smells like nectar, sweat, and the pungent break of greenery. Her hair has swung loose, curling in the humidity, and when she wipes sweat from her face with the back of her hand, she leaves a brown smudge there like a mark of coup.

He hands her a Melbourne Bitter and she taps his bottle with her own.

Breathing, Jack realizes she's done the impossible. She's brought him back to life.

The knots of his heart have come undone, the hollowness under his ribs filled. The future is no longer foreboding, but bright like flowers unfolding, alive and vibrant, something that will bloom.

He sets down his bottle and rises – carefully now since he has stopped using the cane. He descends the steps one by one without using the railing and stops at the bottom, taking the shovel leaning against the porch and digging two small holes on either side.

Jessa stands above him, watching.

He takes out a tiny packet from his pocket and divides the seeds evenly, covering them and tamping the earth tightly over top.

"What are they?" she asks.

"You'll see," he answers.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

They grow slowly at first, these tiny seedlings. Their tendrils are tentative and delicate, the palest of greens. Then the vines reach the steps, curl themselves to the porch frame, and thrive.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	6. The Metronome Of Her World

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 6: The Metronome Of Her World

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: Of all the chapters, this was the one I had completed most fully. Then I reworked it. I hope the final version is worth it. (PS – the next chapter is Phryne's, in case you were wondering).

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / June 1931 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Jessa?"

His voice brings her back from the fog and swirl of her own thoughts.

Outside the weather is grey; a cold front swept in the night before, bringing a hard frost. Jack's eyes as she looks up are the color of clouds, grey as the cabled wool sweater that only hints at his broad shoulders.

Without waiting she hands him the telegram across their usual Thursday lunch table.

"From my editor," she says simply.

She watches him unfold the paper and read it. He glances up only at the end and then refolds it, handing it back to her as casually as if it were a bill or bank statement or menu card.

"What will you do?"

Peter Jessup's ultimatum remains as clear as ever, his instructions to return to Sydney immediately, or forfeit her job at the _Herald_.

She's been commuting here for almost nine months. The conductors on the Melbourne route know her by name, the taxi-drivers by sight, her landlady at the boarding-house saving her tiny room even when she has to return to Sydney. She keeps her days at the coast short, though, her meetings at the _Herald_ brief, so that she can return by the evening sleeper. The last time she went she found she couldn't open her door for all the mail and _Heralds_ she'd never read (and never would), all her plants having died ignominious and inhospitable deaths. The dust made her sneeze, repeatedly.

Across the table she looks at Jack Robinson. They've been having lunch like clockwork for almost half a year now. She's helped him rehabilitate, recover, and even rebuild. If it's a sacrifice, she doesn't feel it. But she's been living a life strung between these two poles, between Sydney and Melbourne, between the _Herald_ and him. At some point the string must break and she must come down on a side.

"I don't know," she answers without conviction, and then, "What will you?"

It's a conversation they haven't had yet, but the question looms large over them both. She knows he's not independently wealthy, having little in the way of savings. He's managed until now, but with the Depression, he can't wait forever to find employment.

"I don't know."

He mimics her reply, so he explains. "All my life I wanted to be a detective."

They both know he isn't fit for that, not anymore, not with his knee. He might pass for a desk job, but even cleared of criminal charges, his name is still tarnished, like a shirt that's gone through the laundry and come out with irremovable shadows from larger stains.

"If you want anything badly enough, you'll find a way to it," Jessa says at last in their silence.

She's not sure if she means the job, or something more, this shiver between them as his knee brushes hers under the table.

"Will you go?" he asks.

"Yes," she answers him, because she must.

She begins to rise but across the table Jack puts his hand on top of hers. He links them together and holds her there.

"Will you come back?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

It's early when she leaves for the train to Sydney. The sky is barely grey, sun still yawning behind the horizon.

If she thought about it, she might be terrified by what she's about to do, but she doesn't, so she isn't, slipping between the tall Ionic columns into the smooth-stone, Reed and Barnes-designed building that is City Central.

The police station hums as she walks in, the blue swirl of a shift change amidst the pungent sting of last night's coffee, hoarse curses as two suspects are hauled off to the holding cells.

Jessa moves past them all, climbing the steps to the suite of offices reserved for the Chief Commissioner. Here it is quiet; the row of desks is empty, the office girls not yet in, typewriters still covered and this morning's newspapers untouched. It smells like paint, fresh as the new name on the Commissioner's door.

She hears the man she's looking for before she sees him.

" – but I'll be wanting an honest man," the thick brogue bellows, "and you're no' that!"

The voice sounds like pulverizing gravel, something that could smash you to pieces, especially now when it's alight with anger. The phone crashes into its cradle but being on a tight schedule and never one to wait for a formal invitation, Jessa sweeps in.

"Jay Tayler," she says, announcing herself and holding out her hand.

The man behind the desk looks up, not in surprise but in curiosity.

Callum O'Callaghan is only recently arrived in Melbourne, being openly poached from the Western Australia Police in Perth. His eyes are bright and piercing – she feels he might skewer you alive with them – and the navy uniform of his trade is so stiff and new that she imagines it might crack when he moves. The insignia of his rank – two crossed and wreathed batons below a crown – is embroidered in red on his epaulettes, scarlet as the flaming hair on his Irish head.

He takes her in slowly, carefully but not covetously. Jessa can tell he is one for detail, someone who believes in starting what you finish, a man that aims what he hits for, even when you hope he might not.

(She knows someone else like that.)

He rises, unfolding impossibly large, and takes her hand in his, dwarfing it, rattling to her bones as he shakes it.

He gestures for her to sit, and she does. There are so many stacks and files on his desk that she can only see him at an angle, a square-jawed Picasso through the pages of unfinished reports and unsolved crimes left behind. It can't be easy walking into a position where your two predecessors have been found guilty of major crimes and you have been left to pick up the pieces.

"What is it you're wanting, _a Stóirín_?"

She moves the stacks so she can see him more clearly and begins to sort out the various folders, shifting summary offenses from indictable, separating murders from manslaughter.

"You need a Deputy Commissioner," she begins matter-of-factly, as the pile of burglaries almost topples over traffic offenses.

His eyes narrow, and she feels his hackles rise like invisible spines.

"You'll want an honest man for the job," she continues. "Someone with experience, who knows Melbourne inside and out, someone who can sort out tangles, who can make sense of things that don't make sense."

She keeps sorting; there have been twenty-two murders this year, fifteen of them unsolved, two within the last month.

Jessa hands him the cases and waits until the Commissioner's curiosity gets the better of him.

"Who?"

She tells him.

" _Dia ár sábháil_!" The commissioner swears, face turning redder than usual. "You cann'a be serious!"

But she is. Of course she is.

"You know there's only one kind of man who would suffer so much for so little."

"You think the truth little?"

"No," Jessa answers. "I think it's everything. And so does he."

She rises to catch her train but his deep voice catches her as she leaves.

"If ya' think so, then why're you leaving?"

Jessa breathes, and lets the world fall into place.

"Because I'm coming back."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The Melbourne train is late.

(Of course it is.)

It's nearing noon by the time the engine pulls into the station and passengers disembark to the crowded platform.

The skies have gone grey again with June rain as she steps off, umbrellas scudding like dark clouds. All around her families merge together, children docking to their parents. Lovers embrace.

But Jessa stands alone, a single rock in the eddies of a human tide, as she always has.

Then she sees him.

If she had never seen Jack Robinson before, she would still think him handsome, still find herself drawn to him, the way he moves through the world. She would still like his honest face and the broad slant of his shoulders under his suit jacket. She would still be attracted to the sharp way he knots his tie, to the brisk ruffle of his roan hair, the tilt of his head when he smiles.

She'd still be one breath short of composed when his slate and sky eyes settle only on her – as they do now.

He comes to her as fast as his knee will allow him.

"Jack – ?" she begins, but he doesn't wait, but wraps her against him and kisses her, firmly, fully, his mouth on hers so she tastes the balm on his lips, the coffee and mint on the tip of his tongue. Her arms come around him, slipping under his coat and buckling them together, and she's oddly aware that the station platform around them has suddenly gone silent, that everything's stopped except them, except this way things should be.

At last (and all too soon) he pulls back, and they breathe.

Around them the world resumes its vigilant flurry as if it had never stopped.

"You did it," he says, holding both her hands.

"Did what?" Jessa asks, nonplussed as he watches her with his granite and skylark eyes.

"Talked to the Commissioner."

It's joy that she feels, Jessa realizes, pure and irresistible. He's breathless and giddy with the spark of it all, and she swoons just a little.

"I did what anyone would do."

Jack laughs. It's low and warm, and it makes her belly shiver.

"No," he tells her with certainty as he brings his hand up to cup her face, the lines of his palm against her cheek, "you did what no one would do."

Her own words come back to her then, but behind them a matron tuts her disapproval, and they consciously separate, smoothing coat and skirt, extricating themselves from the open stares of passers-by.

"It's Thursday," Jack informs her as if she didn't already know. "How about lunch? With the new Deputy Commissioner?"

"How about an exclusive interview?" she counters, "with the new Senior Reporter and Crime Correspondent of the Melbourne _Times_?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Somehow it feels like an age later as Jessa watches him walk into the newsroom the next day, the space engulfing her for its Friday night emptiness.

Two burglaries and a missing child have put them both on duty tonight. It's the way of the world, the way it must be with them, so it's gone ten by the time Jack Robinson shows up at the _Times'_ offices, far too late for the dinner they had so carefully planned.

Her hands are smudged with ink (her cheek too, though she doesn't know it), the dress she'd found so fashionable this morning now lined with limp wrinkles. Her short hair swirls in wild disarray after having pencils tucked behind her ear all day, and she's replaced her lipstick twice after too many cups of coffee.

This is who she is, but Jessa wishes – just a little – that Jack could see her smartened up and polished out, in tall heels and sparkles in her hair, in a silk dress the bright color of her name, the flutter of it like her heart when he speaks her name. Perhaps one day he will.

Jack offers his arm as if none of it matters (perhaps it doesn't) and together they go out into the night. There's a storm coming in, the clouds are wild, and Jessa closes her eyes, breathing in the storm, the salt, the water – all these things she can't see but yet knows are there, like him, Jack, them.

They stand for a moment on the corner of the street, neither moving forward nor back – not towards the bright diner that smells soul-temptingly like hamburgers, nor towards the quiet bar where she can have a whisky and water until her mind begins to unwind from its frenetic labors.

Thunder rumbles from afar and people hurry by. One of her reporters breezes past on his way home, bicycle tires swishing as he waves and disappears. Two uniformed constables nod to Jack, who tips his head in return, as they march forward on their appointed rounds.

A siren shrills in the darkness, and they both jump.

Jessa feels his nerves as much as her own, this hesitance of suddenly making everything they've imagined real, her hand so primly on his elbow the conscious awkwardness of touch – too much and not enough.

It's the rain that does it, skies breaking open without warning. Water plashes over them, large fat heavy drops that spill unendingly from the heavens above.

For the Greeks it was the first element, the most important, more necessary even than air, more giving than earth or fire. Ancient philosophers believed it was the medium in which all was born, in which all life started.

Jessa doesn't think they were wrong, and she can't help but laugh about it.

Jack turns to her, almost startled, and then as water sluices over them, joins her as well, mirth rippling between their bodies.

Cold rain sputters on her skin, but Jack's hands are already there, reaching for her, pulling her into the shelter of his arms. He wraps her in his coat, enveloping her in its warm male scent of wool and soap, hailing a taxi that sloshes hastily towards the curb. He pulls open the door and she scrambles into the dry confines. He piles in next to her without waiting, his unbending knee sliding under hers, the ball of his hip rolling into her side, his palm coming to rest on the top of her thigh.

"Vautier Street," he says to the driver and she doesn't contradict him.

Water is bucketing down from the sky when the driver brakes on the Elwood street before Jack's bungalow. They hurry out, up the walk to the safety of the porch. Between them the jangle of his keys blends with the drum of rain as they rush inside, balancing on each other's imbalance.

The door slams closed behind them, locking them in or the world out. Jessa isn't sure and doesn't care.

Through his windows lightning purls the edge of the sky. The streetlights flicker, then disappear as the electricity snaps out.

In the darkness Jack reaches out and finds her hands, bringing them together. His palms are warm, her fingers cool. His hand comes to her cheek as he kisses her face, the brow of her eyes, the line of her tilted nose, the tip of her chin. She sighs as his tongue catches on her neck, the place where her pulse beats.

He steps back then and begins undressing her carefully. He sheds his coat from her shoulders, coming behind her to unfasten the closures of her dress. His hands skim over her skin as he slides the wet fabric from shoulder to waist to floor. She steps out of it, wobbling perhaps only a little as he unfurls her stockings, palms sliding reverently over her perfect, bending knees.

He rises then, and in a flash of lightning she hears the breath catch in his throat.

She realizes why only too late.

We all have scars, she'd told him (was it an age ago, or just yesterday?), but most people can't see them.

Now, here, he does.

"Jessa..."

She stiffens and tries to turn away but he holds her there, losing all words but her name as he touches her, tracing each jagged line in her skin with his fingers, so softly that she can feel the pads and whorls of his prints as he memorizes these marks, this dark lightning branded onto her flesh.

The hairs rise along her arms and gooseflesh breaks out as he kisses her there, his tongue warm so that when he finally pulls back she feels the chill of the wind on her wet skin, the ghostly echoes of his touch.

She shivers and turns to him, slipping around in his hold, her fingers nimble on the buttons of his shirt, his pants, stripping him too until they are only skin to skin, her fingers rippling over the marks on his own back as he takes her to his bed.

After being frozen for so long, their bodies melt into motion. It isn't fast or slow, hard or soft. It isn't about laying claim or taking charge. It is simply about two people finding refuge from the hard edges of the world, from the hurricane of its madness. Here, now, they are in its eye, the calm of his hands on her cheeks, her arms around his back, their bodies aligning like stars so that he comes to her, comes home.

"Jessa," he breathes against her skin as they merge, "Jessa called Jay."

He kisses her then, long and slow and deep, as they rock apart and together. Lightning fills the room, but they are only shadows, blurry lines of darkness and light in the wake of a greater storm.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

She wakes in the morning to bright sunlight and Jack's smile.

His head is propped on the flat of his palm, watching her. Jessa wonders how long he's been awake and if he knows how handsome he is in the morning light, his hair tousled, stubble shadowing his jaw, an errant mark on his shoulder from the night before.

Her stomach flips a little bit; who wouldn't want to wake in this man's bed?

"Good morning," she says, closing her eyes again and stretching out under the covers.

"Yes, it is," he answers, reaching out and tucking a stray end of hair behind her ear. The edges of his knuckles are soft on her face.

She murmurs deep in her chest as her toes come against his ankles and she flexes her body, reveling in the stiff bend of it, the latent memory of pleasure and the odd pop of her vertebrae.

"Coffee?"

"God, yes."

It isn't strained or awkward. In fact, it just feels like home.

The morning air is cool and she hooks her bent knee over his hip, pulling herself against his warmth. There's a hum between them, a rumble in his chest that reverberates in hers.

His hand slides from thigh to knee and he very consciously pulls her even closer so that she feels the warm rise of him where they join. She shivers as his mouth comes to the point of her shoulder, as he lights feathery kisses on her skin.

"You sure?" he asks, dangerously innocent.

Oh, she could get used to this, she thinks. She could get used to mornings like this and nights like before, to the tickle of his eyelashes on her skin to the rake of her nails through his hair, to showing him that two can play this game. Oh yes, Jessa thinks, she could get used to taking that look on his face and making it change in an instant when she touches him, as she does now.

"Maybe later," she manages as she brings her mouth to his. "Yes… certainly, later."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

So they have lunch on Thursdays, dinners on Tuesdays, and his quick breakfasts in Elwood on Wednesdays before she drives them into Melbourne, City Central and the newspaper office being only blocks away from each other.

Work dictates their schedules but not their lives.

They have coffee on Mondays, go to the cinema on Fridays, walk in the park or on the beach on Sundays. Hugh and Dottie join them on Saturdays, Hugh being an absolute disaster with the barbeque as Jessa cuddles with baby Faith, shielding her tiny ears from the men's amusingly profane language and Dottie's intent interventions. Sometimes Mac comes by for tea, sharing gruesome tales from the hospital that somehow make them all laugh. Sometimes they spend the day with Callum and his brood, his fiery red-haired wife and six children squawking around like banshees as the adults sip spiked coffees and the Commissioner puffs away on a cigar.

Sometimes they just spend the day in their own company.

They have an unspoken mindfulness about their relationship, taking care with the time they spend together. They both understand keenly that a modern world, even in 1931, frowns upon unmarried lovers, especially such prominent ones.

Yet there is something obvious and irresistible about their affair, something so bright and honest that few can resist it, few can speak against the affection when Jack forgets himself and brings her to him on a crowded street, when she looks across a crowded room and he is the only one she sees.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / August 1931 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

Outside winter blows itself out of Melbourne, but inside Jack slumbers without moving, his body caught tight and pulled military straight under the sheets. She can't sleep so she rises and slips out of the room, pulling the maroon and navy striped top of his pajamas over her head as she goes.

In the darkness Jessa moves carefully, avoiding furniture, her hip against his couch, her elbow against his wall, table to the knee. She has a map of him, of his space, all in her head.

The wood floor is cool under her feet, and in the front room she opens a window, just a crack. Cold wind blows in, bringing the scent of early-blooming wattle.

Part of her wants to rush back to bed and curl against him; the other waits, shivers, and moves on.

She ignores the electric lights (she doesn't want to wake him) and instead finds a candle in the kitchen and a box of matches. A flame zings awake, and the room wobbles as she touches it to the wick, ripples of light crashing like waves of water against his walls.

She lights the kettle and pops open the tin of biscuits he stashes on the highest shelf in the pantry (as if that will stop him from eating them). She picks out the mint slices from the fruit rolls, letting the chocolate melt on her fingers as she eats.

The first time she looked in his cooler she'd found only four bottles of beer, two eggs and a sullen potato growing protuberous sprouts from its eyes. Now without looking she knows there's enough for at least a proper meal and probably a rather sumptuous breakfast. Jack is prepared like that, and actually a good cook. She really can't admit to more than burning water for tea, which she does now.

The kettle burbles and she pours the boiling water over the dark dried leaves. Swirls of heat rise off the surface and she cups her hands over its warmth, walking into the main room.

Here is where Jack Robinson lives most, from his favorite armchair (which honestly she finds most uncomfortable) to his large desk scattered with work, to Alfie's wonderful bookshelves that span the entire room, filled with a lifetime of his readings.

Jessa has a reporter's curiosity, insatiable and undiluted, and it is the desk which interests her most, so she slides into his leather chair, still holding her tea.

Jack has told her to be at home here, so she is.

Water rings have left a permanent mark on the woodgrain surface, evidence of his work habits and numerous cups of tea. She sets down her own mug amidst the dark spirals.

Jack's desk is a delta covered with the silt of his life.

Jessa runs her fingers over his files of police work, his bookmarked readings (Poe and Proust, _The Good Earth_ and _The Road Back_ ), a set of road maps for Ballarat, and several of the last editions of the Melbourne _Times_ , her sections folded face-up.

Notes on fragments of paper drift across the surface – _grey suit_ , _Mac 2pm_ , _don't forget_ – in his handwriting, strong and spiky, in sharp black ink.

She takes up his pen and adds her own illusive cursive below – _my favorite_ , _forget what?_

A floorboard creaks, and she turns, thinking he must be behind her, but there is nothing, just old wood contracting with the cold. She realizes what she feels is just his smell, the one she's come to adore, of Imperial Leather soap and cologne. Underneath there is the sharpness of gun oil, and she opens the first drawer of his desk to find the case for his service revolver, the gun clean and safe within. (She knows he keeps another in the bedroom.)

She opens the other drawers to find bank statements and medical records, his military files and war medals, the deed of sale for the house, receipts for a suit and a hat, an order for a pair of shoes, his pension plan, and a sheaf of testimonies and affidavit copies. There are certificates for meritorious duty, a stash of out-dated calendars, old birthday cards and a set of gold-rimmed stationary (unopened and obviously a gift). On the other side he has hidden a palette of soft pastels and a few dark sketches; two bottles of aspirin and a hidden bottle of whisky amid an assortment of paperclips, unsharpened pencils, and a ring of keys.

It's only as she reaches for the bottom drawer that she realizes something is different. Unlike the neat precision of the others, this one has been rudely crammed with upended detritus. A ragged red and green Abbotsford scarf, unraveling and almost in pieces. A rather weighty book, spine up and cracked, entitled _Erotica of the Far East_ (well, she wouldn't have thought that of Jack).

Below is a framed picture, turned upside down, its glass broken – she can see sharp edges like shark teeth on the bottom of the drawer. Carefully she pulls it out, staring at the dark-haired woman making faces at the camera in what appears to be a mug shot.

She knows who it is, because it's the same woman in the yellowing newspaper clipping she excavates from the very bottom, the paper crumpled and water-stained.

 _Is it love-all for the Honourable Miss Fisher?_ the byline reads. _It seems the raven-haired lady detective has found a new ball boy in Inspector Jack Robinson._

The image is grainy but she can see clearly how the woman clings to him, her arms flung around his neck. Jack's hand has come to her hip, holding her against him as they stare at the camera. For all the world they look like lovers in this single moment, and she wonders (like everyone else, she supposes) if they really were.

Jessa wants to hate her, but finds she can't.

That's what happens in life. We hurt people, sometimes without meaning to.

Wind whispers in through the window and this time when she looks up Jack is not an illusion. He is wearing only the bottom of the pajamas from which she has absconded with the top.

She could say many things, but she asks only one.

"What happened?"

She knows about Phryne Fisher, knows her from Mac and Dottie and society newspaper columns. But in some ways, it's like knowing a paper doll, only seeing one bright side of a much darker whole.

For truly, she knows part of the story (God, she's written it herself), but not all of it, and she's never heard it from him.

Jack doesn't hesitate in his answer.

"She left."

"You didn't follow her."

It is a statement, not a question.

"No," he says quickly, and then, as if relenting. "She wanted me to, but no."

"Do you regret it?"

He must say yes, Jessa thinks too late, and she can't blame him. It's terrible and marvelous what others can do to us. What can destroy one person may save the next. If Phryne hadn't left, she wouldn't have known him, but then, he wouldn't have suffered, not the sting of alcohol, nor the ache of alone, the bitter path of his injuries and arrest.

She would never ask that of him, Jessa realizes, because that is what love does to people.

But then, she doesn't have to ask, because he answers for her.

"No," Jack tells her. "No, I don't regret it."

He comes to her then and Jessa sees in him what she has always known: that without falling, we cannot rise. Here, now, in Melbourne, as Deputy Commissioner, with her, Jack Robinson has risen.

Jessa thinks that perhaps the past is best left where it always is – behind us.

"I waited for her," he confesses, and she realizes there is no bitterness in his voice. "I waited for her for two years, one to come to me, and one to come back. But she never did."

He comes to her then, tilting her chin so she has to look at him, at this fierce and vulnerable look in his eyes.

"Only you did."

She feels him like a force now, like she hasn't ever before. Jessa thinks he will kiss her but he doesn't. Instead Jack picks her up (he makes it so easy, even with his knee) and holds her against his chest, bringing her against the beat of his heart as if by the simple fact that it is still beating can be enough.

Only the burn in her lungs reminds her to breathe.

He moves, his stride marred by his fractured knee, but he doesn't let her go until he reaches the bed, until he sets her there so that he comes with her, his weight pressing her under him.

His lips meet hers, kissing only the corners of her mouth so that she can feel his night stubble against the softness of her cheek. He drifts lower then, to the ripple of her collarbones, the flat pate of her sternum, the hollow between her breasts, to the flare of her navel, the curl of her hip, the deep valley between her legs.

His breath echoes on her skin, on the part of her there, and she turns shaking from his touch.

"Jack…"

She's never had a man come to this, and she means to stop him, to stop her traitorous and keening body, but when he looks up and meets her eyes, she feels his need like she has never felt another's. It is bare and unyielding, without pride or pretension. In return she feels her own desire, how much she needs him. There is no lie in it.

"No more waiting," he says and untangles her hand from the sheet that she didn't even know she'd been gripping so tightly. Jack winds it into his, weaving her fingers through his own.

Gently, slowly, he touches her, his mouth warm, his breath humid, tracing tiny spirals on her skin so she relaxes into his touch. Then his tongue reaches for her, delving within the crescent of her body. Her back arches at this first touch, nails biting into the skin of his hand but he doesn't let go, doesn't stop.

Her breath is caught as he continues, as her body ripples with him, as he brings her closer and closer to an edge, a sharp place where pleasure and pain, where the world as it is and as it can be, divide.

He – and he alone – brings her to that edge, and heart beating wildly, Jessa lets go, held only by the fragile and indestructible tethers of love.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / January 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

It's late when she knocks on his door, past midnight.

Winter has burst into a blistering summer, and the heat swirls around her humidly. She is sticky with sweat even at this hour.

She wouldn't have come except that she didn't know where else to go, and the light in his window burned brightly, bringing her like a moth to a flame.

Jack opens the door, reading glasses on and robe askew, the latest Zane Grey held to his chest, his finger marking his page.

"Jessa?" His voice pitches oddly at the sight of her. "You alright?"

"No."

"Come in," he says and she goes.

"What's wrong?" he asks as he closes the door and she pivots to face him.

She's washed her hands over and over, but she feels the words of tomorrow's headlines still black and bleeding from her fingertips.

"Murder, kidnapping, assault," she begins, fingers fidgeting. "We do such horrible things to each other."

The past months have only seen the Depression worsen in Australia. So many people are out of work now, so many are driven by desperation. Husbands abandon their families; wives walk out; children are abandoned. She's done what she could, organizing breadlines and soup kitchens, sponsoring health care and youth programs. But sometimes for all she does, for all that is done, it feels like an eternal backslide, as small crimes turn into larger ones, larger ones into catastrophes. Those that can't make it, break it – or break themselves in the process. Suicides skyrocket, shantytowns spring up, soliciting and shoplifting proliferate.

"We kill, we steal, we hurt – " she breaks off, breath stuck in her chest as tears well in her eyes.

This is her job; she knows this is how it goes. But sometimes there are nights like this when the world twists and headlines read like slit wrists, words strangled and starved of light. And then it doesn't seem like it will – or can ever – twist back.

"I know."

The devil of it is that she knows he does, that he too has felt this anguish, that his life collapsed because of it. Of all people to understand, Jack Robinson would. Deputy Commissioner Robinson, who sees the same things, who perhaps sees them even more clearly than she. After all he sees the deeds of the world written in blood and bullets, rather than ink.

She's never had anyone like that before.

He brings her against him but she is still livid and does not want sympathy.

It's hot and she's sweltering, burning from the inside out. She twists the robe from his shoulders and strips her own clothing so violently that she hears a seam rip in protest. She is unable to bear anything but his touch on her skin as she takes them to the bed, and perhaps not even that.

Jack tries to stop her, to slow her furious assault as they sprawl on the covers, but she refuses. He grips her wrists, trying to pin her, but she jerks away. He wants tenderness, he wants to heal her gently with his love, but she will have none of it. She is broken, jagged tonight, as furious and reckless as that young girl on the Canberra streets. There's a fire under her skin, a fury that seethes out like acid.

The rawness of her burns, but Jack does not let go. If he will have her, she thinks, then he too will be burned by it.

In the darkness she throws her leg over him and straddles him backward so that she can't see his face as she brings them together before she's ready, making them both gasp with the sharpness of it.

Her hands come to his knees, the one smooth and the other healed into a lump of broken bone. Her short nails claw into his skin as she drives them together, her movements rough and erratic.

She doesn't want to think, she doesn't want to feel, she just wants her body to break from her mind in a roar that hollows her from inside out, that leaves her empty and unfeeling.

She thrusts against the rub of him, hard and relentless, but she can't bring herself to release.

And then he touches her.

His fingers are gentle as snowflakes on her back, as he traces the scars that mark her there.

"Jessa."

She falls forward with a sob, choking on a grief that is both hers and not. She realizes only too late she's calling his name, that she has been for some time.

He separates them gently and gathers her against him on the rumpled bed, her head tucked into his shoulder as she weeps and he shares her pain when she has ever borne it alone.

"We want the world to be a better place, but is it?" she says when the tears stop. "Do we ever change it?"

Jack's hands come to her arms as he pulls her before him so he can see her.

"You changed me."

His words are honest and brave and perhaps that is enough; perhaps it is everything.

He kisses away her tears, so that when he brings his mouth to hers, she tastes her salt on his lips, making her feel this sting of the world made sweet.

"Open your eyes."

He pulls her over him, facing forward now as he brings them together again, slowly, mercifully. Her hands are knotted with his so she has no leverage, no advantage, just the balance of their two bodies linked as one. Her knees slide against his hips, her toes curled against his thighs. He moves with her so it builds in slow waves, the motion between them like the ocean at high tide, until at long last it crests within her, surging from cusp to core.

Her fingers tighten around his as she keeps moving, letting the aftershocks of her body move his, bringing him with her in a release that comes not from the spark of their bodies, but from the deep and inscrutable wells of their hearts.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"Why do we keep fighting?" she asks in the darkness.

Jack has switched off the lights, but they haven't yet found sleep. Jessa can feel his breathing, the rhythmic rise and fall of his lungs as her head rests on his shoulder, his arm around her waist, her hand over his beating heart, the metronome of her world.

"Because there is some good in this world, and it is worth fighting for."

She thinks he might end there but he doesn't.

"You're mine."

He answers so simply, so truly, that she can't help but believe him.

"I need you to remind me of that."

In the darkness Jack finds her chin and tips it so he can kiss her mouth, so that he can take her breath and give her his own.

"I will."

The butterfly in her chest sweeps its wings against her heart.

"Every day?"

"If you'll let me."

She feels his smile as she kisses him back, as they breathe and come together as if they had never been apart.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

There is a blue box on her desk the next morning.

He is as good as his promise; Jack Robinson would never swear to something he couldn't guarantee.

The ring is small, but the diamond blazes fiercely.

No more waiting, Jessa thinks, and lets it glow on her finger.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

Springtime sun shines down around her at last as she enters City Central Police Station. Summer had swept into a long winter in 1932, cold and cloudy with snow in the hills, with ominous tidings of elections in Germany, a grain crisis in America, trade protests in London. The Melbourne _Times_ has not run short on stories, and her columns have only increased with continued news.

Yet there are good things too; Dottie is expecting her second child, Mac has opened a new hospital, and she, Jay Tayler, has been named Journalist of the Year, feted with a grand celebration in Sydney, Jack as always by her side.

The Commissioner's suite buzzes like the busy hive it is when she walks in, the lunch cart creaking by with its stale sausage rolls and bacon butties, a shift of new constables gawking as they pass, two lawyers waiting impatiently for an appointment. A dark-haired woman fidgets restlessly under the old clock, conspicuous in flashy alligator shoes and a startling orange dress.

She walks forward without waiting, greeting the flock of secretaries as she goes, but sets her sights on Jack's girl, Sybil, who immediately looks up at her name.

Jessa leans on the desk and looks down at her.

"Sybil, it's _Thursday_."

She smiles dangerously, and the girl blanches, just a little, as she walks forward and opens the door to Jack's office. He motions her in as he holds the phone to his ear. She can just hear the Chief Commissioner's rough Irish brogue on the other end.

" – and then tomorrow – "

"Lunch," she orders.

" – we can – " Jack waves at her and keeps talking.

Jessa walks over and slides down on the desk, sitting before him as he looks up at her from his chair.

His eyes open wide as she leans down, blouse swinging low, her fingers curling around the nape of his neck as she pulls him towards her. Callum's voice buzzes through the receiver as Jack promptly stops talking.

His shoulder dips as he reaches for her; she catches the mouthpiece and tucks it neatly into the cradle, severing the connection.

"Lunch," she whispers into his ear as she kisses the edge of his jaw.

"I was talking – "

She nips the lobe of his ear with her teeth.

"Now."

They laugh together as Jack pulls her into his lap.

"We could eat in," he murmurs, his lips salving the thrumming pulse of her neck as he slides his hands along the silken expanse of her stockings, fingers lingering on the nubs of her garters.

"We could not," she replies, feeling all too strongly the pull of anticipation at his touch, the way she always does. She rises and smoothes her skirt as Jack sighs dramatically and pulls himself upright, gathering his hat and offering his arm as poor consolation.

The phone starts ringing at Sybil's desk as they walk out, looking as unruffled as possible. The girl looks up for her instructions as usual. Callum will be spitting nails, until Sybil tells him who absconded with his second in command. Then he'll lapse into one of his Gaelic proverbs, chuckle, and wonder how a non-Catholic came to be so lucky. He does it all the time (mainly because they do too).

"Tell the Commissioner I'll have him back in an hour or so."

Then, her arm in Jack's, they disappear out into the glorious sunshine, oblivious to the strangled stare of the dark-haired woman behind them.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

As usual, Jack buys two prawn rolls and several triangles of fairy bread (she adores it though he thinks it too sweet) from the café on Lansdowne Street before they stroll into Fitzroy Gardens. The green space is awash with the whole of Melbourne enjoying the first bright weather of the season.

They sit on a vacant bench and eat, making small talk between mouthfuls and then resting in the shady warmth without speaking.

In their silence Jack takes her hand and lets the diamond glitter in a ray of sun.

"You haven't said yes, you know."

It's true, she hasn't. She has taken his ring, his heart, and she wants to take his name. She has accepted his comfort, his love, and his home, but she hasn't formally agreed to be part of it. She can't say what it is exactly, but something holds her back, some small dark shadow in the corner of her heart.

"Are you sure?"

"I am."

He is, and he smiles. Her heart relaxes as she thinks no one could resist one of Jack Robinson's smiles.

"Marry me, Jessamine Tayler."

She stands, his hand still in hers, a lifeline between them, and answers.

"Yes."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	7. This Side of Paradise

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 7: This Side of Paradise

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: This is for Babsmd, for reminding me to write, and for Elsa007, for not breaking her heart (I hope).

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"You always did work late."

Jack's head lifts in surprise as Phryne speaks, leaning on his office door. It's late, but she knew just where to find him.

Below City Central rolls on like a thoroughfare, but up here it is still and quiet.

Papers and folders drift across his desk, and the air is thick with the smell of ink, and just under it, sweat, coffee, and cologne. Jack's sleeves are rolled up, his collar is loose, his tie discarded. His hair is curling up at the nape of his neck, and he pulls off his reading glasses to look at her properly.

"Surprised I'm not in bed with hot milk and a Zane Grey?"

Phryne flounces into the chair opposite him, her Vionnet dress of amaranth-colored chiffon swishing around the curves of her calves like the tulip petals blown in a Floris-scented wind.

"You always were an exemplary public servant."

Jack watches as she sits, as they take up their respective positions as they always had. It's hard to imagine that she's only been back in Melbourne for four days. On the outside she knows the world has changed (it's why she's here, after all), but sitting here, opposite Jack, it doesn't seem to have changed at all. Here, with Jack, it feels like she's never left.

"Well, I can't claim all the credit," Jack smiles at her, "I was assisted by an exemplary Special Constable."

He pauses for half a second. "Though I do remember I had to rescue her numerous times."

"Rescue me!"

She can't help but blurt it out, and Jack chuckles that deep, rough mirth at her expense.

"From exploding steam rooms, and people throwing knives at you, and weights falling on stages, and being locked up by human traffickers – "

" I – "

" – and from Murdoch Foyle."

Phryne pauses for a moment. What can she say to that? It was why she had come to Melbourne in the first place, how she had first met this particular Detective-Inspector. Afterward, he had been the reason that she stayed (even if she didn't realize it at the time).

"I remember the murder at the Green Mill – " she answers instead.

" – the death at Victoria Docks – " Jack picks up.

" – the carnival and the fabulously fearless Miss Fern – "

" – the performance of _Ruddigore_ – "

" – the feather dance at Madame Lyon's – "

" – searching for pirates' gold in Queenscliff – "

" – the dulcet tones of Mr. Archibald Jones – "

" – Christmas in July – "

" – your aversion to mistletoe – "

" – your tennis game – "

" – your waltz – "

They break off and laugh, giddy and breathless with the remembrance of it all. It feels as if she could reach out and touch the past just as she could reach out now and touch Jack, take him by the hand and pull him into her future.

(Can she?)

"What else do you remember?" Phryne asks him.

Jack considers for a moment.

"I remember you were a beautiful Cleopatra."

She breathes with the memory of it, the white dress, her Roman soldier.

"I remember that you would have been an excellent Antony."

Jack looks down and shuffles the papers on his desk, putting them in meticulous order. He lines up the corners neatly and speaks but his tone has changed. The air in the room shifts as he rises.

"Not exactly the role model for relationships."

He switches off the desk lamp, leaving the room in shadows, and moves towards his coat and hat.

Phryne rises with him.

"I remember when you had a bit too much to drink once," she rushes on. "I remember that I put you to sleep in my bed."

Jack stops.

It doesn't feel like so very long ago when everything between them was on the cusp of possibility.

They had nearly kissed that night on her stairs after arresting his father-in-law – she had praised him for always doing the right thing, the noble thing, but he had come towards her like a storm, brilliant and destructive all at once – and then Aunt P. had walked in.

Phryne had made great plans for it to happen again – except it didn't. Her father had arrived, the cavalcade collapsed, and she had gone into detective mode. She invites Jack over, but leaves him waiting as she sits on a suspect. Of course, that should have been Jack's job, but she had always blurred the lines between their jobs, perhaps even their lives. It's only now, looking back, that she realizes Jack had sacrificed his to be with her, though she couldn't do the same. In her absence, Mr. Butler had served him to the best of his ability, which was not inconsiderable given Phryne's collection of libations. And then there was the nerve tonic…

Phryne moves to him as she remembers that night, savoring what could have been. She still remembers it now: his trim suit was the color of kalamata olives, his voice husky as he tells her he can't be one of her liberal-minded men. She remembers keenly the disappointment of it, the frustration of undressing a man in her bed without being able to ravish him. She remembers Jack's skin was warm against her cool fingers, remembers the slide of the navy pajamas along the curves of his body.

She comes to him now, hands on his shoulders, stopping him in place.

"I had been hoping you would have returned the favor."

Phryne whispers the words against his cheek, so close they must get stuck in the light bristle of his stubble, her breath caught against his skin.

What had she wanted when he opened the door last night? Nothing less than to erase three years of the past in the heat of the present. She had wanted him to take her by the hand and go inside, to strip her bare of everything, even memory, to kiss her until she can breathe nothing but his hope.

"Phryne – " Jack speaks, but she brings her mouth to his now, cutting off whatever else he might have said.

She's only kissed this man twice – or, more correctly, he's only kissed her. Yet when so many other men are eminently forgettable, she remembers Jack's kisses with a clarity that almost scares her. That day in the Café Replique, his hand firm behind her neck, drawing her to into his kiss. That morning on the airfield, strong coffee on his tongue, the brim of his fedora ruffling her hair.

Neither of those times is like now, when she is bending and he is not. Jack is stiff against her, his spine straight and unbending, his body at all the wrong angles to fit with hers.

"Phryne – " he cautions, but she ignores it and presses him backward into the wall. The jolt shocks him and he opens his mouth to hers, their bodies finally aligning, the soft places of hers with the hard lines of his.

"God, Phryne – " he breathes, as if they are one and the same, and then she can't answer him because he is kissing her back, kissing her like she has rarely been kissed before, hands threaded in her hair, pulling her to him.

"Jack …?"

The voice trails off and is gone completely by the time Phryne turns, but she knows who is it before she even moves.

Jay Tayler stands in the shadow of the doorframe.

Her face is pale in the shadows, her skin fading to the silver-green of her neat suit, the color of the underbelly of leaves when the wind blows them upside down.

Phryne had been wearing a similar color dress that night she'd put Jack into her bed, tulle and beads the bright color of chartreuse in fact, dangerous for being so damn delicate.

It all happens so suddenly.

Jay whirls in the shadows and Jack crashes against Phryne, throwing her off balance.

She reaches for him to steady herself, but he is already gone, pushing by her roughly and surging after Jay's retreating form.

For the first time, Phryne notices how much he limps.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

She thinks he will show up at 221B The Esplanade because he always has before.

Jack has always come back to her (except that one time she asked him to come to her and he didn't).

Tucked up in her black silk robe, she pages through _The Virgin and the Gypsy_ , sipping Courvoisier. But she can't concentrate and keeps thinking about the look of shock on Jay's face, the raw pain of it.

She thinks she should feel badly about it, but she doesn't.

In truth, Phryne can't believe that Jack would be serious about the woman, or any woman for that matter. After all, in the two years that she had known him, he'd barely looked at other women. He'd divorced Rosie and though he claimed to be serious about Concetta Fabrizzi, that had been over practically before it began. He doesn't really have a track record for romance.

Yet the hours tick by, and alone she grows restless, falling asleep on the couch only as the sun rises. When she wakes, it's nearly noon and there's a terrible crick in her neck. She directs the operator to ring City Central, and then his home in Elwood, but Jack answers at neither.

Phryne tosses her head, dresses, and heads for door.

But when she opens it, Dorothy Collins is waiting on the other side.

"Dot!" she exclaims, faltering on the step. "Won't you come in?"

This determined woman is not the quiet girl she remembers. She seems so settled, so firm and rooted to her life here. Phryne supposes that's what motherhood does to you. She can't accept it, but she can admire it in others, at the proper distance.

"Why did you do it?" the younger woman asks without moving.

Phryne waits for her to continue the thought.

"Why did you come back?"

Phryne cannot understand this question until she sees the vivid anger bleed into this woman's eyes. There is a blaze in Dot now and Phryne feels its burn.

"You left us," Dot says and her voice is amazingly calm. "You never wrote, or rang, or even let us know you were alright."

She shifts her weight carefully around her big belly, as if she is trying desperately to keep her balance.

"We all thought you would come back," she continues. "We believed it. Why wouldn't you? This was your life, wasn't it? This was where you belonged, with the people you loved – and who loved you."

Dot breaks off and takes a breath.

"But then Aunt P. died, and Jack got hurt, and still you didn't come back."

Dot isn't crying, but she's close to it, and Phryne has never been good with tears. So she takes Dot inside and says what she should have said all along.

"I came back because I fell in love."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Phryne doesn't mean Jack – or rather she does – but she fell in love with someone else too.

To be specific: Geffrey George Clarence Calthorpe Leverton, Duke of Ransley, Earl of Everard-Sanborn, owner of Southwell House in Kent, and sixteenth in line for the British throne.

His baptism had been attended by the newly crowned King George V, his schoolmates the young princes. He is taught to play polo by the Viceroy of India, Lord Curzon; he learns to play cards from Consuelo, the Cuban beauty of cigars and sugar cane, who becomes the Duchess of Manchester. The family name on his father's side was traced back to the Domesday Book, and besides a few parvenu flings in the eighteenth century, the Dukes of Ransley were acknowledged as one of the unfailingly respectable mainstays of the British nobility. That was, until George Leverton, the twentieth Duke of Ransley, impetuously married Vivian van Laren, an aspiring American socialite known as "Vivi." Geff was born three months later and when war broke out in 1914, George immediately volunteered, being among the first British officers mown down in the massacre of Ypres. Without shedding a tear Vivi packed up and shipped out to New York. She took a permanent room at the Waldorf-Astoria, so Geff grew up along Fifth Avenue and Central Park, his summers in Newport and the Berkshires, his new acquaintances the Astors and Vanderbilts.

Little changes except the names (and which hand is supposed to hold the fork when eating).

He is sent back to Britain at the end of the war to attend Eton. Vivi herself returns only in 1923, when American funds are running low, for Geff, now age eighteen and off to Oxford, to formally possess his inherited fortune as the twenty-first Duke of Ransley.

He leaves the university less than a year later when it is revealed he is having an affair with a married woman (who just happens to be the Prime Minister's wife). A string of dalliances had followed, film stars and opera singers, heiresses and socialites, French models and Russian ballerinas. He happily whiles away London Season after Season, from Royal Ascot to Henley Regatta, from the opening of Parliament in February to the Glorious Twelfth in August.

Phryne meets him on a cool morning in February 1930. The Season hasn't formally started, so the only people in town are artists and bankers, both bemoaning their economic situation with renewed vigor as aftershocks of the great Crash continue. She has stayed here with her mother, to fix the mess her father had started, but everything's in disorder now, family, money, world. Phryne worries about it all, from the food on their plates to her mother's health and the family's dwindling finances.

So, leaving a spent lover, Phryne throws caution to the wind and decides to walk home to the Fisher abode in Bloomsbury. Even dirty Southwark seems beautiful in the early morning wind. The sun is just beginning to rise as she crosses Tower Bridge, pausing at the apex to watch the colors rise in the sky.

Below her the river is as slow as time; behind her traffic – horse and car – swirls. Motors and hoofbeats echo on the roadside but it's only when she hears the jingle of bells that she turns.

Her marabou stole blows around her face, her beaded dress the color of rosehips swaying around her legs.

At first she thinks she must be imagining things, because the most handsome man she's ever seen (and she has seen some) is staring back at her, seated on the box of a bright red surrey carriage pulled by four perfectly-groomed zebras.

"Hello," he says and sounds as out of breath as she suddenly is.

Traffic surges around him, horns tootling. But Phryne doesn't notice that, or that the zebras are stomping their hooves impatiently, or that it's begun to rain. She notices only his bluejay eyes, that thick shock of dark hair, the sharp cut of his Savile suit, the gentle play of his fingers on the leather reins.

"May I offer you a ride?"

"Where are you going?" she asks.

"Wherever you want," he answers, but she is already moving, taking his gloved hand and swinging up beside him as the zebras snatch at the bits and squeal as they gallop off through the traffic.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

What she wants is breakfast, so he takes her to the Savoy, dashing the zebras straight down Fleet Street to the Strand. Hooves rattle on the Court as he pulls up underneath the great art deco sign.

Steam rises off the zebras' backs as he swings down off the box and reaches for her hand, not letting go even when she reaches the ground.

They waltz in windswept and breathless, her marabou dotted with rain, a bright arc of water spinning from the rim of his top hat.

Their heels click over the deserted marble floor of the sumptuous lobby, and despite the early hour, he demands the chef be roused and breakfast served. Remarkably, it is, a sumptuous feast not of toast and tea and bland full English, but practically a private buffet as an endless line of staff offer dish after dish. She hardly knows whether to choose eggs with sautéed chanterelles and Spanish avocado; or perhaps the quiche Lorraine studded with fresh crab and pistachio crust; or maybe, the wafer-thin crepes with whisky-cured Scottish salmon and fresh melon, flown in specially from the Caribbean islands?

There's Turkish coffee, and champagne cocktails, tart with grapefruit juice, orange liqueur, and a dash of rosewater.

"Who are you?" she asks, as they finally rest back in the plush chairs, content and sated.

His eyes are the color of meltwater as he looks at her.

"Geffrey Leverton," he answers. "And you?"

"Phryne Fisher," she replies.

He rises then and offers her his arm, weaving through the corridors to a back entrance where a car is waiting. He brushes aside the waiting staff and holds open the door of a Duesenberg Speedster the same bewitching shade as her dress.

"So, Miss Fisher," he asks, taking the driver's seat and slipping on a pair of soft calfskin motoring gloves as if daring her to surprise him, "Now what?"

Phryne looks across at him and answers. "Now you get out and let me drive."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Geffrey Leverton is one of the most eligible bachelors in London. With his dark good looks and charm (to say nothing about his title and money), it's not hard to see why. According the _Tatler_ , he pips even the royal princes to the top spot. He is strictly labeled NSIT ("not safe in taxis"), but waves of debutantes have set their hearts on him, oceans more of their mothers.

Phryne fully expects the infatuation to fade away when the novelty wears off, but it never does. After two weeks, she is surprised. After four, she is amazed. As winter turns into a very soft spring in 1930, Geff courts her with an unwavering and undiminishing devotion that breaks hearts from Dover to Dublin, from Monaco to Moscow.

She forgets about everything but this, this time she spends with him, this way he turns a blind eye to everything but her next word. Geffrey is beautiful and bold, and five years younger than she is. Perhaps that makes all the difference. He has never seen war, has never seen what she has and she doesn't want him to. He sees the world as it is, and reminds her not to see it as it was.

Phryne has never lacked for male attention, never suffered from a lack of passionate declarations of love, or rash actions on her behalf. But it is something new to feel herself so in tune with only one other person, so close to him that suddenly she can't imagine being anywhere else.

She is in love, perhaps, she thinks, for the first time in her life.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

The Depression continues around the world, but here there are still parties for everything, and for nothing. People glitter, and, like a magpie, Phryne has always been distracted by bright, shiny things.

Suddenly London is vibrant and electric. Every evening there is dancing in ballrooms decked in garlands of water-lilies, followed by swimming in the fountains at midnight. There are card games and charades (both of which she comes out tops), but corridor-creeping is the national sport as lovers criss-cross the hallways of country estates looking for their partners. Invariably Geff comes to her bed, ignoring the morning bell that rings discreetly at six to creep back. She admires his zeal, and he is certainly … _zealous_.

But he is also solicitous and considerate, and when her mother falls ill again, he sails them to Biarritz on his yacht. At night they make love on the open deck with the sound of the sea in their ears and watch as the stars turn over the sky.

They return to Southwell House, the Leverton family manse in Kent. He has plans to update it, to renovate what was a crumbling Tudor pile into a historic estate. They make love in the maze garden as the sound of hammers rings out, the scent of crushed verbena and geranium heavy on their skin.

Phryne's worries disappear in the encircling warmth of his arms and the swansdown surety of the Leverton name. The family that was rich in title and land is now rich in banking, steel, and shipping – a wealth that makes hers pale in comparison. Geff may not know much about any of them, but he knows people very well, knows how to pick his managers and let them run his businesses. He likes people who know more than he does.

"That's why I like you," he tells her one night in May as she sits brushing her hair at his bureau. Cool air blows in through the tall windows of his Mayfair home, but he lays stark naked like a Greek sculpture on the bed behind her as she watches him in the mirror. "Didn't you know, hen?"

Phryne's head lashes around on her shoulders.

"Hen?"

"Yes," he concludes quite seriously. "I read a Fitzgerald book on the way over – " he means the Atlantic – "and there was something in it about wet hens having great clarity of thought."

Phryne is literally stunned silent.

"And you do, don't you?" Geff says as she comes to him on the bed, black hair flying, robe swirling, a veritable dark hurricane of wrath and indignation. "Also, you were quite _dreich_ when I first saw you, standing there all alone on Tower Bridge."

He rolls his American 'r's to sound like a Scottish burr. Her heart thuds at the rumble in his throat, that sounds he makes when she touches him as she does now.

"I'm not accustomed to being compared to farmyard animals," she manages with some dignity as he slides her robe to the floor, her indignation quite forgotten.

"Yes," he says as he kisses her, "but _panther_ doesn't quite roll off the tongue the same way, now, does it?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

So it's not that she forgets about Melbourne, but that it seems so very far away. It only took fifteen days for a panicked daughter to fly her father to London, but it takes far longer for mail to follow course. Her letters are addressed to the Fisher house in Somerset, so even though they were written just after she left Australia, she doesn't see them until she returns there after Ascot in June. By then she's so caught up in the rush of the Season's end and accepting Geffrey's invitation to his Scottish estate, Dubh Éadrom, for the shooting in August, that she hardly has a chance to read them.

The ink is fading on the letters and the Post Office telegrams are yellow and crinkle at her touch. She finds them again at Christmas, but the news seems so old and though she means to reply, she never does.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

So time slides away, and Phryne relaxes into her life, this life. The rest of the world fades away and if it were to crash, she would be the last to know.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / September 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"For the love of God, Mac," Phryne pounds on the door, "let me in!"

Phryne's knuckles sting with knocking at the door. After her dismal encounter with Dot and her frustrating inability to locate Jack (her detective skills have grown rusty with disuse), Phryne tries her next best option. She needs someone to talk to but when the doctor finally answers the door, she tries to close it again.

Phryne has long since learned this trick and pushes her way in.

She sees only too late the reason for Mac's resistance.

Jay Tayler rises slowly from the sofa, where she is sitting next to Dottie Collins. All eyes turn to her and unusually she feels the bonds between these three women. They surround the reporter, sheltering her.

For the first time, Phryne feels herself an outsider.

Garnets, her birthstone, sparkle around her neck, and her Boulanger dress of thick velvet, so perfect for Jack, the pelt of it just longing to be touched, seems so inappropriate now: too short, too hot, too heavy.

The color is lush as pomegranates, the fruit of temptation that led to the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden.

She is as dark as the others are light; Mac with her red hair twisted up, wearing Turkish trousers the bright aquamarine color of her eyes; Dottie pink as Meissen porcelain in a dress the color of mint leaves.

And then there's Jay, the brightest of them all, shimmering palomino in an ivory pantsuit, a silk blouse that bright color of buttercups, an unpolished opal at her throat.

That's the difference between a sparkle and shimmer, Phryne realizes. One casts sharp edges, the other soft.

Jay reaches over and helps Dottie to her feet, and the younger woman slips out and past her without a word.

Now it's the two of them, she and Jay, facing off.

"Tea?" Mac offers, nervously. "Coffee?"

There is no answer.

"Yes, I think so," she concludes and disappears into the kitchen.

The two women stand there, without speaking. There are dark circles under the blonde's eyes, tight lines fractured around her mouth, and Phryne knows (without knowing how) that Jack never caught up with her last night. Concetta had taken her defeat gracefully, Rosie spitefully, but Phryne sees now it will be different with Jay.

If they'd been men and a hundred years ago, there would have been pistols and rapiers, fisticuffs at dawn, and Phryne doesn't trust herself against this woman.

Perhaps it's best they aren't men, she thinks.

"Why did you come back?" Jay asks at last, breaking the silence. "Was it for this? For him?"

Phryne doesn't know how to answer, because it would be simplest to say yes, but that wouldn't be quite true. Somehow she feels that this woman already knows why she's here, and it makes her feel guilty. Not for kissing Jack, but for not telling him the truth. She will never feel guilty for kissing Jack Robinson (though she might feel quite badly about not kissing him sooner, before she left, years ago).

"Yes."

"Would Geffrey Leverton agree?"

And there it is. It doesn't take a lady detective to figure out her secrets, just a news reporter.

"He asked me to marry him," Phryne finds herself saying.

"I know," Jay answers her. "You said yes, according to the papers."

"I did."

"Then why are you here?"

Phryne is so very tired of that damned question.

"Don't you understand?" Phryne yells, voice finally breaking with the strain.

"No!" Jay explodes right back, flaring into such an angry, incandescent Amazon that Phryne nearly has to step back. "No, I don't understand! You had three years to come back to him, and you didn't!"

For a moment anger vibrates around the room and then slowly simmers down.

Phryne takes a breath and answers slowly.

"I came back because I couldn't marry one man if I was in love with another."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

It began at the Savoy Ball.

As all of London gathered for one last grand affair before the August holidays of 1932, she and Geff had won the coveted prize for best costume, he as Eros, and she as Psyche.

Amidst the applause, he had dropped to one knee and held out his hand to her, the Leverton diamond glittering in the light.

Around them all of London went silent.

"Be my Psyche," he asks her in the expectant hush. "Be my soul."

(Somewhere someone swoons and faints. It isn't her. Phryne isn't fit for swooning.)

But in the light he is so earnest, so young and beautiful, that she can say nothing, but: "Yes."

And so the woman who pledged that she would never marry suddenly became engaged.

Immediately there are appointments for dresses and jewels, decisions for invitations and locations. Must the old Earl of Abermarle be invited, can Viscount Bromley return from India? Should the Archbishop of Canterbury perform the service, will vows will be at Westminster or St. Paul's? Shall they celebrate at the Savoy or Southwell House, must oysters be on the menu, which champagne would she prefer?

It's startling the level of detail, and the minutiae of British protocol baffles even the most hardened courtier. Geff tells her to do as she pleases ('tell them all to go to hell?' she inquires sweetly; 'perhaps not that,' he replies), which is no help whatsoever.

Phryne despairs of all of it, and thinks she must scream. She does, in empty rooms, but no one hears.

Is this what she has wanted? Thinking of Geff, she wonders how can it not be? Thinking of everything else, she wonders how it can.

It can't be

It isn't.

He is asking her to be someone she isn't, that she has never been. She has never been Psyche; from the very beginning she has always been Phryne, not a goddess but a courtesan.

She is dressing for yet-another dinner when it happens, rooting around in the ruckus of her jewelry box and desperately trying to find her other red jade earring. In haste she tips the box so jewels old and new cascade across the Aubusson carpet.

All around her the world glitters in facets like magic.

But as she bends down, it is not the earring that catches her eye. Rather it is a swallow pin, battered but still beautiful, the tiny bird's wings gleaming in blue enamel.

It was the first thing she'd ever stolen, if you didn't count male hearts.

She has no idea how her grandmother acquired the little bird, but such tokens were often given by sailors to their sweethearts before sailing away on their journeys, a jeweled promise to return home just as the swallows always flew back to where they belonged.

Jack had found it and given it back to her.

Always and irrevocably he had given her the freedom she claimed she wanted – except only now she knows it isn't.

It wasn't.

It can't be.

Phryne holds the bird to her chest. She can feel the beat of tiny wings in her heart, urging her to fly.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

"But you could have had Jack at any point back then," Jay says, bringing Phryne back to the present. "Why didn't you?"

God, she could say so much. How is it that it took her, a detective, three years to realize she was in love with another man, and that she always had been?

"I didn't know I wanted him," Phryne answers her honestly.

"And now?"

"Now I do."

Jay nods her head; it is a subtle and elegant gesture, graceful in its barrenness.

"Does he want you?" the blonde asks.

"I don't know," Phryne answers truthfully. "He did once."

"Then find out."

The reporter moves for her things. There are no tears, no tantrums. It is as if she has known this was coming, as if it is almost a relief that it has. After all, this woman has been living with her ghost for years, the one in Jack's memory.

The problem with ghosts is that they are not human, that they are always and heart-breakingly perfect.

The blonde pauses by the door and turns to her.

"He loved you, and he almost died for you," Jay tells her. "Now see if he wants to live for you."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Mac comes back in with the coffee, and sets it down on the table. She looks for Jay and then reclines into the chair, propping her feet on the table and lighting the odd cigarette.

Phryne sits down across from her.

"So you finally met a man you couldn't walk away from," the doctor says, summing things up in that distinct and clinical way of hers, "and you ran away instead."

She breathes out a plume of smoke like a dragon.

"Is he worth it?"

Phryne turns to her.

"Which one?"

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	8. Artemis and Athena

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 8: Artemis and Athena

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: One final chapter will follow this one …

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / October 1932 / - / - / - / - /

* * *

Jack watches her round the corner and come up his front walk.

The sun is setting, bringing shadows with it. Spring has come and gone already, plants flung into life by the early warmth. The gardens are alight with flowers, cool hues of phlox and petunias, radiant with lobelia and lupines, the ocean brought inwards. The porch is bedecked like an arbor with waves of tangled green vines.

The air hums with bees and the candied scent of blossoms.

Phryne Fisher struts to the porch, heels clicking, dress swirling. She is Artemis the huntress in the flesh, dazzling and destructive, her sights set resolutely on him.

There was a time when he could only have dreamed of such good fortune.

But that time is not now.

Jack hasn't seen her for almost a week, but he knows she's been looking for him, searching him out. It's just that in the aftermath of that night, that kiss, he hasn't wanted to see her, couldn't see her.

How could he see her if he hasn't seen Jessa?

He has looked for the reporter everywhere since that night, but he understands that she doesn't want to be found, and if so, he will not find her. Jack remembers the look on her face all too well, the deep and searing betrayal of it.

His fear is that she will not forgive him, that she cannot. After all, how could she, when he cannot forgive himself?

So fear has frayed into anger. Jack is angry with Phryne, angry that she stops at nothing to possess whatever she wants, angry that she suddenly wants him, angry that she has such bloody bad timing.

But above all, he is terribly angry with himself, for his weakness, for holding on to old dreams that have long since died.

Phryne comes to the swing and sits next to him. For a moment the seat teeters, stops, and then rocks on just off balance. She is so close he can feel the warmth of the sun on her skin, see a hazy pattern of lace beneath the sheerness of her blouse.

"Jack – " she begins.

He responds immediately.

"Goddamnit Phryne!" he practically shouts, anger broken like a dam. "What makes you think you can come back here and pretend nothing changed?"

Phryne Fisher has always lived for herself – it's what so appealing and so distressing about her. For three years she left behind this life in Melbourne for that of London and never – not once – looked back. She left behind him, though he had no claim on her, or she on him (except, he knows, his heart). With everything happening in the world (and bloody hell, it Crashed, didn't it?), did she ever feel worry or sadness or guilt? Did she think about death every day? No, Jack knows, she didn't have to. Instead, she lived her life, savoring the golden minutes of it – with someone else.

Yet while she was doing this, cavorting with royalty (literally), he was here, dying, almost dead. He faced an excruciating recovery, one that she was not part of and one that he could not face alone. Luckily he didn't have to. His life grew back, without her in it.

Color has risen in Phryne's face, and when she tilts her head towards him, her dark hair sweeps back like a raven's wing.

"What makes you think I would be the same?" she retorts, eyes flashing dangerously. "When I came back?"

The distance of three years yawns between them, obdurate and unbridgeable, in hard and unforgiving silence.

Jack sighs. He is so tired, tired of this dance between them, always one step off, always one step behind. He is tired of all the things that haven't been said and perhaps never will. He's fully and honestly fed up with the past, with all the things that haven't been done and now can never be.

What he wants now is possibility, what he wants now is hope, what he wants is to live forward.

He stands, slowly unbending his stiff knee and trying not to hiss under his breath as the joint straightens unwillingly. He feels Phryne's eyes on him as he moves away, through the door into the house and to the kitchen. He's hardly slept in these last days, and admittedly he's getting older so he feels it more. Callum has sent him home to rest, ordered him to, but he can't.

He stands alone at the counter, nearly heaving with the effort of it.

At last he turns on the taps and adds water to the percolator, spooning in dark coffee, far too much. The brew will be strong, terribly so, but he needs it. As bubbles gurgle he turns off the stove and pours the thick black liquid into his mug.

He doesn't realize he is crying (that he is really crying) until tears plash into the still, dark surface of his coffee, spreading ripples to its rim.

"Jack?"

When he turns, he realizes that Phryne has followed him inside.

She stands now, in the center of his space, looking at him in askance.

He looks back and then wipes at his face.

This dark-haired woman can't know that the green mug on the counter (the one he doesn't use) is Jessa's, that the collection of tea is also hers, as are the apples in the basket, the hazelnuts shelled in the dish, and the mint slices too, that she eats them as she works, the smell of chocolate strong on her fingers, so that if he kisses her, he will taste it.

She can't know that behind Jay's yellow dress hanging on his door, there are blouses and suits and stockings stacked in his closet, tucked into his bureau, that he's brought in her garden boots from the back stoop so they don't fill with rain, that he's hung their wash, towels and linens and smalls, on the line outside.

Phryne doesn't know – will never know perhaps – that her mementos are hidden in the lower drawer of his desk, relegated only to a small pile of rubbish and broken pieces.

Instead what she can see are the framed photographs of this beautiful blonde woman, the one on his desk of Jessa laughing, caught unaware by one of the newspaper agents, or the single image on his otherwise blank wall, of Jessa receiving her journalism award, with him by her side.

What she can see is that there are chairs on either side of his desk, the surface demarcated by his work space (police folders, reports) and hers (newspapers, notes), so it's hard to tell where one ends and the other begins.

This is what life does.

It shapes pieces into wholes.

What they both see – what they can't fail to see – is his luggage neatly stacked by the door, waiting only for the slightest call to go after Jessa in the way he never did for her.

Phryne catches his eye now, and he understands that she has come here for confirmation, and she has gotten it, though not the kind she wanted.

He holds out the coffee to her, and the spell is broken, not cruelly but gently as only some things can be. There is an unseen mercy to it as Jack holds the door open and Phryne walks back through it. They go out to the swing, sitting gingerly together.

For a long time they sit and rock in the breeze and say nothing.

"I am sorry," Phryne says at last, without looking at him. She doesn't say for what.

Jack breathes at her words.

"So am I," he replies. "I shouldn't have expected you to be the same."

A corner of Phryne's mouth twitches up as if to grin yet stops short of it.

"I should have expected you to change."

Jack practically snorts at the understatement, but he reaches over and takes her hand in his, the calluses of his palm to the softness of her rose-cream skin.

Phryne's fingers wind through his as she speaks.

"She told me to find out if you still loved me."

"Who did?"

"Jay."

"You mean Jessa?"

Phryne nods slowly, as she takes in the way he says this other woman's name, this way her vowels and consonants dance on his tongue.

God, he thinks, Jessa would, wouldn't she? Jack understands why the reporter has gone now, why she has given him this space. She would have him make his choice, and Jack realizes only now the extent this one woman will go to make him happy, and he wonders how she could be so mistaken that Phryne could do that. Perhaps she would have once, but he knows better now. He knows her, he knows Jessa, called Jay.

"Do you know where she is?"

Phryne looks at him, gauging his response. At last she looks away.

"I don't."

He lets out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding.

"And if you did know?" Phryne asks him.

Jack looks at her and, from the edge of his eye, can see the suitcases waiting.

"If I did," he answers, "I wouldn't be here."

It stings, his answer, he can see that, but there's no hope for anything but the truth.

"You knew where I was," Phryne points out, with more than an edge of hardness to her words.

"I did," he answers.

What was it that kept him from following her? Was it fear of the unknown, the fear that she didn't mean what she said and that he would arrive to find her with another man? After all, she'd said that her father was the last man he needed to worry about in her life.

Or was it something else, something that held him back? Did he know then, as he knows now, that it wasn't a passion that could be sustained, that it was like a flare, all the more brilliant for being so brief, all the more poignant for being unfulfilled?

He's not sure he really knows even now.

"Why now, Phryne?" Jack asks her. "Of all the times you could have come back, why now?"

She is quiet and then, suddenly, he reads into her silence the way he always did.

"He asked you to marry him, didn't he?"

Now he understands why she has come. Part of him cringes at the thought of it, but the rest hopes, hopes for a happiness he knows he couldn't give her, then or now.

They'd once agreed that it would take a brave man to propose to her, or a very foolish one.

"And you said no?" he presses,

"No," Phryne answers him. "I said yes."

His surprise must be evident because the corners of her mouth turn up at the expression on his face.

"But if you said yes, then why are you here?"

She looks at him as if to make his heart stop with it.

"Because I needed to know," she tells him. "I need to know if I still love you as I did."

He turns to her, unsure he's heard her correctly.

She breathes, it seems, for both of them.

"And do you?"

"Yes."

God, what can he say to that? These are words he once dreamed of her saying. No, he stops himself, he never dreamed that, because that was too impossible even to imagine.

And what could he do now about it, Jack wonders, her hand in his, these little strips of bone and sinew and flesh bound together. What could happen between them, what could they make possible? He could move, take her in his arms and go back inside, kiss her, make everything possible – everything but their past.

"I loved you too," he answers her.

"Jack – "

He reaches over and puts a finger to her lips.

Phryne stops at his touch.

There are no words to be said, even though there's so much to say. There are three years of things unsaid, and more than that, the two years before she left. Jack wonders if Phryne realizes now the lifetime of things she has missed, if she even can. She has missed blood and bullets, she has missed fear and longing, she has missed hope and recovery. She will never have those things, the terror of life in the balance, the bone-gnawing of life at a crossroads, the first sudden sun as he met Jessa, as she was his strength, as he opened new doors, began new roads, and all with someone else.

As did she, apparently.

And isn't that a good thing?

"It wouldn't have worked, you know."

He removes his finger from her rouged lips.

"I did love you," Jack says and the way he says it, she must know that he has. "I knew you didn't want to be married, and I could have done that. I knew you wanted your own house and your own rules, and I could have done that too. I even knew I wouldn't be enough, and that you would want other men."

Jack takes a short breath. "I thought I could have done that as well."

He shrugs; he probably couldn't have.

"I could have lived with you, I think, or I like to think so, but I didn't have to imagine living without you, because I did," Jack finishes. "But I can't imagine living without Jessa."

Phryne gets under his skin – always did – until he wants to burst but it's Jessa who makes him comfortable there. He understands now that Phryne couldn't face what was between them, that her fear was greater than her emotion. She valued her independence more than she valued her heart. She was scared, that's why she ran away and that's why she never came back.

She did it then, and she has done the same now.

"I'm scared, Jack," Phryne admits and he hears the truth in her voice. "There are things going on in Europe – in Germany – and Geff – "

She breaks off, unable to continue.

He knows this too. They have lived through one war and don't want to see another. The world is changing, in ways they can't possibly understand. Perhaps more than it ever has before. He feels that, and he too is afraid.

But it's Jessa that makes him brave, making him think that they can face it – whatever comes – together.

"Times have changed," Phryne starts.

"And we have changed with them," he answers.

"If only we could – "

"We can't."

'If only' will break your heart.

Phryne reaches over now and he lets her. She cradles his face with the palm of her hand, cool skin against the warmth of his cheek.

"Are you sure I can't change your mind?"

Her voice purrs against him and he can't help but smile at her, this old wicked and endearing Miss Fisher, this woman he's kissed three times, this goddess mis-named for a courtesan, this Phryne.

"Yes," Jack answers without reluctance. "I'm sure."

Phryne pulls herself back and considers him.

"You do love her, don't you?"

"I do."

The dark-haired woman moves now, setting down the empty mug and standing, her silhouette against the sky, all the curves and spaces of memory only a hand's width away.

In the setting sun she turns to him, cast over with ruby shadows.

She glows, radiantly.

Yet Jack understands that this is not the same woman who walked up his steps a few hours ago, and part of him feels sorry for that loss. And yet somehow, Jack knows that this is her finest hour. She, Phryne, he, Jack, will rise phoenix-like from these ashes.

He smiles at the thought, and she smiles back.

"It could have been so different if only you'd come," she says.

"It could have been so different if only you'd never left," he answers.

Phryne grins, and he watches as she sashays down the steps and reaches out, ever so softly, to the twining vines, this beautiful helix of green and yellow flowers. From such small beginnings the seedlings have grown into a floral archway, crowned with star-yellow blooms as if guarding the entrance to his home.

Phryne leans over and breathes in the heady scent of the flowers.

"They're beautiful," she says, "What are they?"

" _Gelsemium sempervirens_ ," Jack answers.

He translates.

"Jessamine."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - / Two Weeks Later / - / - / - / - /

* * *

"You always did work late."

Phryne's voice comes to him and Jack looks up, startled. It's gone ten, but he hasn't wanted to go home, not alone, not to cold rooms and an empty bed. So he's sat here in his spartan office at City Central, night cleaners working around him, re-reading the same lines over and over, signing his name to things he can't recall.

The dark-haired woman stands against the door frame, her coral dress flaming out of the darkness.

For a moment there's a sweep of panic in his chest, at her perseverance, at what happened the last time she appeared here. There is a deep and dark desire in her eyes, the way she looks at him. It ruffles his stomach, makes the hairs rise on his forearms.

But then she speaks to him.

"She told me to find out if I loved you, Jack Robinson," Phryne begins and then very softly, "And I do."

She moves then and from behind her another woman steps forward.

Jessa comes out from the shadows and his heart stops.

Her blonde hair is slicked around her lovely face, her twill jodhpurs and buff-color shirt dark against the paleness of her face, the vivid burn of her salve-green eyes.

He rises so fast he's nearly dizzy with it, and he comes to stand before her.

"Jessa," he breathes.

Up close she looks as he feels, brittle and a little off balance. Only now can he feel her hesitance, Athena dented and distrustful, when she has ever been the forthright one.

Out of the corners of his eyes Jack watches Phryne leave, backing slowly out of his office so that it's just the two of them. He'll never know how Phryne found her, or what the lady detective said to the reporter, but perhaps some things are best left mysteries.

Yet even so, Jack knows that Phryne doesn't leave, that she can't, that she waits just outside, back to the wall. He knows she is still listening, as always a shadow that remains on his heart. She is something that will never disappear, and he is glad of that, a sharp, tiny, resonant fragment, a piece of shrapnel that will forever be in his soul.

Perhaps that's all that matters, she understands now, the people we hold on to and the people we let go – or who let go of us.

His voice breaks into the silence.

"I thought you were gone."

"I never left," Jessa answers him. "I couldn't get farther than Collingwood."

"I would have gone to Carolina."

"Would you?" she marvels and he nods. "But what about her?" she asks.

Every moment of his life has led to this; every moment forward will depend on it.

"I don't need her," Jack answers truthfully. "I need you."

He does. He needs Jessa like he needs to breathe. He reaches out and brushes his knuckles along her cheek, and she leans into his touch.

"I want you to be happy," she says.

"How can I be happy without you?"

Jessa smiles then, at last, and takes his hands in hers. Her silver-green eyes well with tears as if all the sea-glass in her is melting now, glowing into the form they both will shape.

"Then I'll fight to the ends of this earth for you, Jack Robinson."

She comes forward and he holds her against him, arms around her back, hand threaded into her hair, her head tucked into his shoulder so all he feels is the beat of their hearts, their lives settling together.

"I might need you to remind me of that," he answers, his own eyes blurring with the effort.

Jessa laughs and he feels her breath tickle his skin. He closes his eyes to her touch.

They will go home, soon, home to the bungalow where her things are and his heart resides. They will go home, she will slip off her shirt, his hands will slide on her skin, his breath will catch on her name. Then she will turn and he will be there, and perhaps that's all life really is, being there.

"I will."

"Every day."

"If you'll let me."

Jessa pulls back and looks him in the eyes.

"Are you sure?"

"I am," he answers.

"Marry me, Jack Robinson?"

"Yes."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

.


	9. Some Things Do

Title: Jessa Called Jay

Chapter 9: Some Things Do

Author: Elliott Silver

Summary: "Come after me, Jack Robinson," she'd said, but when he tries, she doesn't answer. Three years later, Phryne Fisher returns to Melbourne.

Author's Note: Thank you to everyone for being there along the way, if you loved it or hated it, if it made you laugh or cry; thank you for being on this journey with me.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

Sunbeams cascade through white panes of glass.

Phryne Fisher has to shield her eyes against the brilliance as she walks in, her footsteps echoing like evensong in the interior of the tiny police chapel in City Central.

In the December sunshine, the space glows, and, for a second, she closes her eyes to bask in its radiant warmth.

But she is not alone.

A man waits at the altar, dressed in a slate-grey suit. The window-light reflects off the soft weave as it tapers over his shoulders, slides down the slim lines of his lapel until it hits the single flower tucked in his buttonhole, that single, star-yellow bloom.

He looks up at her, and the light hits the handsome angles of his face, the high bones of his cheeks, picks out the roan-grey in his hair, reflects the pale fringe of his eyelashes.

Phryne Fisher walks down the aisle towards him.

Jack Robinson waits for her at the end, and for a moment (perhaps just one small eternity) they stand there in the light, together.

They stand without speaking, without touching, simply bound in the brightness of memory.

Then Mac comes in, followed by Callum and his wife, Hugh holding on to Faith and Dottie carrying her newborn brother. A happy crowd follows them, more than can possibly be seated, and the silence is broken, joyously and unreservedly.

Phryne smiles at Jack one last time and then takes her seat with the rest of them.

She leaves him standing there alone.

It is the hardest thing she has ever had to do in her life.

When she found Jay again, when she took the reporter to City Central that night, Phryne realized that she had underestimated the reporter; she had underestimated Jack. He could never love someone ordinary. He would love this other woman, someone so much like herself, and yet not at all. He would love someone _extraordinary_ , someone who would sacrifice everything for him, even herself.

And now she, Phryne, has done the same.

Yet she knows that while she admires him and desires him, there are also so many things about Jack that drive her ( _have_ driven her, and _would_ drive her) stark, raving mad. His quiet intensity, the way he wavers in deliberation, the way he is silent when he should speak, the way he is still when he might act, the very rootedness of him; these things frustrate and even infuriate her to her core.

What Phryne wants is dash and rash, to throw caution to the wind and speak out of turn. What she wants is to live head-over-heels and devil-may-care, reckless and giddy and defiant.

So what she wants isn't Jack – not really.

Certainly she loves him enough to let him go, but perhaps she also loves her own happiness more, and Phryne knows (though she is loathe to admit it) that he could not make her happy.

At least, not in the way that someone else already has, this tall man with dark hair, that rakish smile and those meltwater eyes, Geffrey Leverton, the twenty-first Duke of Ransley, who now sits beside her.

Two weeks ago he had turned up at her front door.

"There you are," he had said brightly when she finally answered his persistent pounding.

Without waiting he comes in past her, dragging an assortment of bags and boxes, polo sticks and golf clubs.

It all clatters to the floor when she rushes into his arms and he holds her there.

"Hello, hen," he says, kissing the top of her head.

Phryne laughs against his broad and embracing heart.

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

In the chapel the murmured chatter ceases and a hush descends.

A woman, tall and lithe and striking, appears in the doorway, silhouetted in light.

There is no music but she walks forward alone as Phryne imagines she ever has, to her own tune.

Jay Tayler wears a suit of silk moiré in the darkest ivory, practical and elegant to a fault. Her hair is pinned back with twin abalone combs, a short veil of French net sweeping across her lovely features. She carries a small bouquet of the flowers that are her name, or hers theirs.

The scent of jessamine ripples on the air as she passes, walking straight up to Jack without waiting, handing off her bouquet and taking his hands in hers so he stops shaking.

"She makes him happy," Geff says beside her, because it's so very evident that Jay does.

"I didn't."

Phryne says it without thinking.

"Perhaps," Geff answers, being kind, "but did you want to?"

Before Phryne can answer, the celebrant speaks.

"Today we celebrate the union of two people – "

As the ceremony begins, Phryne holds open her palm. For a moment Geff stares at her. Then he calmly reaches into his jacket pocket and drops the desired object into her hand.

Geffrey Leverton is the kind of man to carry a twenty-carat diamond ring around in his pocket, to fly across the world in case she changed her mind, just in case she might, in the hope that she would, that she possibly could.

Before them the celebrant carries on –

" – I remind you of the solemn and binding nature of the relationship into which you are now about to enter, and to – "

Phryne slides the ring onto her finger, feeling the platinum band settle smoothly against her skin. The stone balances on her finger, and she is surprised to realize that she has missed it, the decadent but comforting weight of it. She tilts her hand, letting the gem glitter in the light, and marvels at the shocking beauty of it, the way it takes her breath away, this small piece of the world made to shine simply through pressure and time.

Perhaps she too has been shaped as it has; perhaps she too will shine.

" – will you honor her, love and respect and protect her? Will you – "

Beside her Geff takes her hand in unspoken agreement.

" – will you accept him for who he is and who he will be?"

Phryne clasps her fingers around Geff's in reply.

" - I present to you now, Mr. and Mrs. – "

Applause breaks out and they all stand, watching as Jack and Jay kiss and pass them by, heading towards the chapel door and that bright, irresistible light of everything yet to come.

He doesn't look at her, but why should he? Jack Robinson has eyes only for Jay – Jessa, called Jay.

That's the way love should be, Phryne thinks, always looking forward and never looking back.

"Some things never change," Geff says as the newly married couple disappears and a resounding cheer goes up from the waiting crowd outside.

Phryne ponders the point, having said it herself so many times before.

Perhaps it's not as true as she might believe. She changed; Jack changed; even Melbourne has changed. She has loved her time here, loved her beautiful bolthole of 221B The Esplanade, but maybe it is time to move on, to move forward. There is a whole world out there, and she has yet to see all of it. There is Tokyo and Toronto, New York and Naples, Budapest and Boston – yes, Boston, where she could visit Jane. And there is America, that long and wide place where perhaps those new devils of Europe cannot reach.

After all, another Janey, from another time, would want her to be happy, and with Geff, she is.

Phryne Fisher smiles brilliantly.

"And some things do."

* * *

/ - / - / - / - /

* * *

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End file.
